The Project Gutenberg eBook of A Waif’s Progress, by Rhoda Broughton.

BY
RHODA BROUGHTON

London
MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

PRINTED BY
WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,
LONDON AND BECCLES.
{1}

A WAIF’S PROGRESS

CHAPTER I

From the other end of the breakfast-table he returned—“Well?” and for several minutes this exchange of monosyllables seemed going to be the end—it was not quite the beginning—of the conversation that had sprung from a letter, and to the perusal or reperusal of that letter Mrs. Tancred had returned.

“Here is another instance of Felicity’s talent for laying her cuckoo’s egg in other people’s nests!” she said presently with a dryish smile. “There never was a woman who did more good—by proxy—than your sister.”

Mr. Tancred gave as much acquiescence as lay in silence to his wife’s indictment. If you are credited with having married a woman for her money, and can never for one whole minute forget it, you must acquiesce in many statements from which you differ far more widely than he did from the one in question.{2}

“I do not think that there is any allusion to her personal appearance. Now, what has become of my spectacles?”—embarking on that exasperating chronic chase which becomes in time the only species of sport left open to the elderly.

“I believe that you can see perfectly well without them,” rejoined he, always irritated by anything that emphasized the fifteen years of disparity in age between them. “What was the use of my giving you those tortoise-shell eyeglasses, if you never use them?”

“Silly, affected things!” replied she, ungraciously, yet with a something of contradictory kindness in her eye; and at the same moment discovering her missing spectacles, unaccountably astride upon her own high well-bared brow, she searched for, found, and read aloud the following sentences—

“Was that the woman who drank eye-wash and methylated spirit if she could not get anything else to quench her thirst?{3}”

“‘You remember my old acquaintance, Lady Ransome? She died under rather disastrous circumstances three months ago.’”

“Methylated spirits?” he threw in, disobedient to his wife’s hest, and she avenged herself by beginning all over again.

“‘You remember my old acquaintance, Lady Ransome? She died under rather disastrous circumstances three months ago. I had done what I could for her, but it was one of those hopelessly inveterate cases of degradation for which no human aid is of any avail; and she died in a very distressing way last August. Tom went to the funeral.’

“I remember hearing that he was the only person who did, besides the two sham widowers who followed her in crape and weepers to Kensal Green.” The interruption this time emanated from the reader herself.

“‘Tom went to the funeral, and came back full of pity for the girl whom I believe to be really Lord Ransome’s daughter. We may as well give her the benefit of the doubt, at all events, though his—Lord Ransome’s—family decline to believe it, and refuse to do anything for her in consequence. As her family repudiated Claire’——”

“Why, the girl, of course! No, it is not. I see further down that the girl is Bonnybell. Claire must be the mother.{4}

“‘As her family repudiated Claire when first she took to evil courses, the poor child has not a relation in the world to turn to, nor a roof to cover her. At the present moment she is with us, and as far as I am concerned might remain so indefinitely; but, then, Tom put his foot down.’”

“‘Under the circumstances it has struck me—I throw out the suggestion for what it is worth—that you might like to have her as an inmate, at all events for a while.’”

“‘She is as gay as a lark’ (gay as a lark, when her mother died three months ago!)”

“Died of drink!” amended he, with that sense of justice which is always more inherent in man than woman.

“‘Gay as a lark’ (dear feeling little thing!), ‘and I thought, and think—indeed, it is one of my chief motives for making the proposal’ (ahem!), ‘that the presence of a bright young creature would bring a great accession of cheerfulness into both your lives.’”

“Are we so uncheerful?” asked the man, in a tone whose vexation was coloured with misgiving.

Tancred’s eyes dropped to the object upon{5} which his hand was already resting, the head of the wire-haired fox-terrier, whom his mistress spoilt most, but who liked his master best. The husband had long ceased to wince outwardly, though never inwardly, when one of the two great “raws” of his life was touched. He had married Camilla, and he had not given her the children for whom she hungered in that passionate greed, only increased by years and improbabilities, with which some women crave for offspring. And now they had been married for fifteen winters, and Camilla was fifty years old.

“You see that I was right; there is no allusion to her personal appearance.”

“Though she is ‘as gay as a lark,’”—harking back rather grimly to the phrase that had displeased her—“she may also be as ugly as sin.”

“Bonnybell!” continued she, derisively. “What a cruelly ironical name to inflict—‘Bonne et belle’—when she is probably neither the one nor the other!”

“Bonnybell! She was probably named after one of the two sham widowers’ racehorses.”

“Ay, so she must have done. Then she was named after one of Lord Ransome’s hounds. If you remember, he kept the Mudshire for several{6} years before a barbed-wire fence broke his worthless neck for him.”

Tancred had known Lord Ransome a little; and the question crossed his mind as to whether it was worth while saying that his neck was not more valueless than his neighbours’. He decided that it was not. If you possess a wife with very decided opinions and a very trenchant mode of expressing them, why not let her enjoy them in peace? You may, at least, make her these trifling amends for the irreparable injury you have done her.

“If we refuse the girl,” he began slowly, after an interval spent in cogitation by two of the party, and in muffled remonstrances at the unusual delay in brewing his slopbasin of weak tea on the part of the third—“if we refuse the girl, what is the alternative?”

“I do not think that that consideration need sway us!” retorted she. “If we let ourselves go, a blind philanthropy might lead us to try and unpeople the Haymarket; and, moreover, it would not come to that. I have never known Felicity fail in getting hold of fingers to pull her chestnuts out of the fire for her, and she will not now.”

He agreed with this view of his sister, and said so; and then there was a pause for refreshment, the slopbowl claim having become too vocal to be longer ignored.

“She is probably as full of hereditary vice as she can hold,” resumed Camilla, presently stooping{7} to test with her forefinger the temperature of Jock’s tea. “No, my dear boy, you are not telling the truth, it is not too hot. Drink on both sides, immorality on both sides.”

“Drink on both sides, immorality on both sides, selfishness on both sides, extravagance and folly on both sides,” enumerated she, checking off the unknown’s heritage upon her fingers.

“Poor little devil!” in a tone of even profounder compassion than had conveyed his former utterance of the phrase. “If your view is correct, she starts in life pretty well handicapped, doesn’t she?”

“Poor little devil!” repeated his wife, in a key of some exasperation. “I think that we should be the poor little devils if we consented to receive such an inmate.”

Again he winced, though this time, if every one had their due, the wince should have been hers. Had she forgotten, or was she impossibly alluding to the one pregnant occasion on which he had not had the strength of mind to say no? Her voice, high and decided, cut into his strangled thought.{8}

“Whichever way we settle it, must be at once—to-day. If she does not hear to the contrary by return of post, Felicity is quite capable of taking silence for consent, and packing the girl off by the next train, as she did her pet inebriate to Mrs. Holmes last summer.”

“I will leave you to decide,” he answered, with an effort at flight, contemptible since it was unsuccessful.

“You will do nothing of the kind,” answered she, seizing him by the lapel of his coat, as he passed her on his way to the door. “You will not shift the responsibility of the whole affair upon me.”

“What do you feel like?” he answered resignedly, not struggling in a clasp which had more of mastery than endearment in it. “Surely it will affect you infinitely more than it will me.”

Seeing him thus docile, she loosed her hold. “At my age,” she said, “all changes in the framework of one’s life seem to be for the worse.”

“Then let it be no,” he answered, though not again endeavouring for freedom, since he felt that one step in that direction would merely mean recapture.

“And yet,” she said, a sort of wistfulness that he too well knew coming into her hard light eyes, “the house is very silent; but for Jock it might be a house of the dead sometimes.”

“We are not very rowdy, I suppose,” he answered, following the ups and downs of her thought with a rueful gentleness.

“We are a dull couple,” she returned, veering{9} round instantly on the other tack; “unquestionably we are often dull—childless people must always be so—but if we admit this equivocal element into our lives, we may become something much worse than dull.”

“On the other hand, there would to you at least be the undoubted advantage of the companionship of some one nearer your own age.”

He laughed softly, rallying her. “Felicity is foisting a young thing of five and thirty on us, then, is she?”

Camilla laughed also, a little unbending in her own grim way, but recapturing gravity and the argument almost instantaneously.

“Granting that she is eighteen or twenty in actual years, she is probably a hundred in experience of evil.”

“In short, you are afraid that she will take the bloom off our young innocence,” returned he, flying for refuge to irony, and resolutely leaving the room this time, followed by Jock, who, replete with tea, no longer saw any object in pretending that he liked his mistress best.{10}

CHAPTER II

“The last day, and almost the last hour! I am thoroughly sorry,” said Felicity, and she was nearly sure that she meant it.

“Sorry is a weak word to express what I feel!” is the heartfelt answer. “Where should I have been now, I should like to know, but for you and Mr. Glanville?”

The speculation as to Bonnybell’s hypothetical whereabouts silenced both ejaculators for a moment or two, until a glance at the clock telling Mrs. Glanville that her typewriter would be back from luncheon in ten minutes, and that she herself would have to return to multifarious work in her business room after the same time limit, hurried her into new final tendernesses.

Possibly the extreme fervour of this reassurance was due to a something, if faintly, yet uncomfortably self-suspicious, in the tone with which the hostess made a statement in whose truth that hostess yet almost believed.{11}

“We have not much time, alas!”—leaving a branch of the subject dimly felt to be a little ticklish with some alacrity—“and I want, before you go, to give you a tiny carte du pays; you may find it useful.”

The hearer, with the black hat and inky gloves of imminent departure upon head and hand, lifted a tiny face of wistful interest in this first recorded fact from the pouf at Felicity’s feet, upon which a slim body, limp with affection and regret, had thrown itself. She at once pensively commented upon it.

Mrs. Glanville broke into a horrified laugh. “Camilla make up! My dear child, wait till you see her.”

“Well, as you have not much time, I must hurry on. She is, as I say, much older than my brother.”

“Poor, poor fellow!” replied the girl, in a tone of the most good-hearted compassion. “But, no doubt, he has his consolations.”

Her hostess looked down upon the peculiarly innocent face at her knee with an expression{12} in which the proportion of amusement to aghastness was considerably less than it had been at some of her protégée’s utterances.

“Bonnybell,” she said, very gravely, “I really dare not ask what you mean!” Then reflecting that the few minutes left her would be scarcely long enough to correct a moral standpoint on which three months’ intercourse had effected so little real change, she hastened on. “Camilla is a right down good woman, but her manners leave something to be desired. In point of fact, she is a good deal soured—embittered is perhaps the better word—by having no children. Unluckily, she is one of those baby-maniacs, who never can reconcile themselves to being childless. I cannot personally understand the feeling; there seems to me something animal about it.”

“I am very fond of children,” replied Bonnybell, thoughtfully; “but when I marry, I shall have only two.”

“You will have what God pleases to send you, I suppose,” rejoined Mrs. Glanville, sharply.

The other lifted her dove’s eyes. “More than two are destructive to the appearance.”

The hostess gave a sort of gasp. Of course, considering all things, the poor young creature was not to be blamed; but would not she herself have done more wisely to have in some degree prepared Camilla for the contents of the singular parcel she was sending her? Did “gay as a lark” at all cover the area occupied by this remarkable young person?

“My dear child,” she said, in a tone largely{13} tinged with misgiving, “if you open the campaign at Stillington by remarks of that class, I shall have you back here in London by the first train to-morrow.”

“Camilla would be outraged at a girl of eighteen alluding to her future family at all; and if you made her the announcement that you have just made to me, I am convinced—yes, I am convinced—that she would take you by the shoulders and turn you out of the house!”

There was a minute’s pause, for Miss Ransome to assimilate this agreeable prophecy. Then she said in a voice of profound gloom—

“I believe that I shall spend my life in being turned neck and crop out of houses; and I shall never know what I have done!”

“You will, at all events, be able to give a good guess in this case,” rejoined the other.

“I shall be able to avoid saying that one particular thing,” returned Bonnybell, accepting her snub with the most perfect sweetness, but in a rather hopeless tone; “but I shall, no doubt, say hundreds of other things which I shall find out too late that a jeune fille ought not to have said. I have not the least idea what sort of things the right kind of jeune fille does say.”

This wonder was expressed with apparently such perfect good faith, and such deferential asking for light, that Felicity—never very hardhearted, and possessed, in this case, by some{14} slight inward compunction—abandoned her judicial attitude.

“Between ourselves,” she said, in a confidential tone, “there is very little that the jeune fille of to-day does not say; but Camilla is not of to-day.”

Felicity thought a moment. “Edward? No, Edward is not of to-day either. Edward is of no particular day; if anything, he has strayed out of the Middle Ages.”

The phrase, as applied to the person in question, had no particular meaning; but Mrs. Glanville admired her brother, and it sounded picturesque.

“We shall make an odd jumble of periods between us!”—still more hopelessly than before. “Oh”—with a sudden burst of clinging affection—“oh, how I wish that Mr. Glanville had allowed you to keep me permanently, as you were so dear and kind as to want to do.”

Miss Ransome’s delicate black arm was flung across her protectress’s knee, and her head and attendant black feathers were flopped down upon it; but she lifted her face soon enough to notice the expression that her aspiration had called up in Felicity’s countenance.

Mrs. Glanville had quite as soon that her young friend’s eyes had remained hidden, being conscious of a slight shade of confusion on the dial-plate of her own emotions, and a qualmy question flashed across her brain as to whether it was possible that in the very tail of the{15} despairing orbs lifted to her, full of such unmistakable sorrowful gratitude, a tiny spark of contradictory mischief and mirth could lurk. Was it conceivable that the child—she was a terribly sharp child, and her vicious upbringing had made her still sharper—could have pricked the bladder, and detected the pious fraud of Tom’s supposed eagerness for her departure?

“You must not run away with the idea,” she said, with more flurry than approved itself to her own judgment—“you must not run away with the idea that Tom dislikes you.”

The little uplifted face was so touchingly, unresentfully sad, that Felicity decided with relief that the impression of hardly detectable amusement in it, received by her a minute ago, must have been an optical delusion.

“We shall both miss you very much,” she said with sincere cordiality. “When you are not impossible, you are as nice a little girl as one is likely to meet in a summer’s day. I have given you an excellent character, and all that you have got to do is to live up to it.”

“To live up to it!” repeated Bonnybell. “Will you mind telling me what you have said about me?”

Misgiving as to the height of the moral plane upon which Miss Ransome was warranted to move so obviously dictated this inquiry that Felicity laughed a little.

“I have said that you are as gay as a lark,{16} to begin with. By-the-by”—with an air of bethinking herself—“if I were you I would not be too gay, just at first. Of course, I thoroughly understand that it argues no want of feeling on your part, and that the rebound is perfectly natural; but Camilla is very conventional.”

Miss Ransome bowed her head submissively under the blast of these somewhat contradictory counsels.

“Gay, but not too gay,” she said, softly; and once again an uneasy faint impression of infinitesimal mirth went like a whiff through Mrs. Glanville’s consciousness.

“I have told her how invaluable you have been to me at the ‘Happy Evenings.’ There I shall miss you cruelly”—with an unmistakable accent of sincerity. “Your knack of holding the girls’ attention and keeping them amused is really very remarkable; so different from poor Miss Sloggett”—with a disgusted backhander at a subordinate fellow-worker in the vineyard of philanthropy.

“Is Mrs. Tancred like you? Like you, I mean, in giving up her life to—to doing good?”

“She is not as active as she might be,” replied Felicity, with a modest regret at the poor figure cut by her sister-in-law in the path of mercy. “Camilla does not come forward as she ought to do; she has that silly horror which I cannot understand”—and, indeed, no one has ever suspected Felicity of it—“of seeing her name in print; but I believe”—magnanimously—“that in her humdrum way, and with the greatest{17} precaution, lest any one should hear of it, she does a fair amount of good.”

“Oh yes, of course, whenever he has the chance. He is on the Stock Exchange!” There was no unconscious irony in the juxtaposition of the two statements.

“He was determined not to be dependent on Camilla—to have a profession—so he went on the Stock Exchange. I do not know that it suits him particularly well; but anyhow it gives him something to do.”

“I see,” after a short pause; “Mr. Tancred is away most of every day, then?”

It took Miss Ransome two or three moments to assimilate this last, to her, incredible piece of intelligence; then she put another question.

“Oh yes, they are always in town from Christmas to Easter. They are not people who do much in the way of society, but in any case that would not affect you this year in your deep mourning.{18}”

Bonnybell’s lip quivered, as if in preparation for a tear or two, but they were relentlessly snubbed back by their owner.

“But you shall help me with my Happy Evenings again,” continued Felicity, perceiving the droop in her young friend’s spirits, and with bowels genuinely yearning over her; “and the Fancy Fair for the All England Cataleptics will be coming off in May. You shall help me with that too. Oh, I am not joking; I really cannot say how much I shall miss my dear little right hand! There is the carriage,” as the butler entered to announce that the brougham was at the door. “This is really too sad! How I do hate the word ‘good-bye!’”

There were tears of real regret in Felicity’s eyes, and a quiver in her voice, as she explained that if the wind were not so cold she would accompany her protégée to the hall door; and that she would say good-bye for her to Tom, who would be so sorry to have been out at the moment of her departure. But as it happened Tom had no need to be sorry. Tom was not out. As the long black slimness set its narrow foot on the last step of the stair, Tom emerged from the smoking-room.

“I am coming to see you off. I will jump into a hansom, and be at Paddington before you,” he said with a carefully lowered voice.

“You will do nothing of the kind,” came the precipitate answer. “I mean”—with a dove-like gentleness of correction of whatever was harsh{19} in her first utterance, “that there is no place so odious for saying good-bye as at a railway-station.”

Tom’s heart was as large as his waistcoat, and there was a tear in his blue eye. It was still trembling there, as he turned from the street door, whence the neat green brougham was no longer visible, to face his wife, who, remembering a forgotten last word, had run downstairs just too late to utter it.

“You are not out! How silly of you, with your bald head, to expose yourself to an east wind.”

“I wish that you would not rub my bald head quite so freely into me before the servants,” returned he, with less gratitude than exasperation, retreating into his lair.

“And I wish,” retorted she, “that you had not compelled me, by your silly sentimentality about her, to banish that poor dear homeless little creature.”

CHAPTER III

“I cannot think why she is coming by such an early train,” said Mrs. Tancred, referring to a note less blackly bordered than she thought it ought to be.

“She spells brougham phonetically, as if it were a besom.” After a moment, “What on earth shall I do with her between tea and dinner time?”

He had tried to make the question as colourless as possible, but had not been able quite to keep out of his tone a slight indication of bias towards the more welcoming course.

“I shall send. I have no wish to be seen by any chance member of my acquaintance who may happen to be on the platform with a young member of the demi-monde sobbing in my arms.”

Edward Tancred received this fiat in silence;{21} even the shrug with which he greeted it was an inward one of the spirit alone, and in which the shoulders took no part. Perhaps the rebuke implied in his muteness or the stings of her own conscience might have suggested to Camilla that she had rather overdone the brutality of her last speech, for though her next utterance was not amiable, the key in which it was pitched was distinctly less trenchant than its predecessor’s.

“I hope she will not think it necessary to kiss me. Of course she will not wish to do so”—Mrs. Tancred had no illusion as to her own destituteness in the matter of charm; her husband sometimes thought that life would be rather easier if she had—“but she may think I expect it.”

“If she does, and it happens indoors, so that nothing compromising is involved, I hope you will be equal to the occasion.”

There was that something of lightly mocking in his tone which, as Camilla knew, implied the nearest approach to disapproval he ever permitted himself of any of her words or actions.

The matter-of-fact answer to a question intended to be a scoff took the wind out of Mrs. Tancred’s sails, which for a moment or two flapped idly against her masts. But presently a new zephyr swelled them.

“It is a leap in the dark, if ever there was one; and at my age the taste for such agilities is pretty well extinct.{22}”

There was such a sombre misgiving in her tone, that his own changed at once to that of the kindest, patientest reasoning.

“Don’t you think you are making rather a mountain out of a molehill? The girl comes as an ordinary visitor. Supposing the worst, that you—we” (correcting himself) “do not care much about her, the visit ends, she goes, and whose bones are broken?”

Mrs. Tancred shook her head. “Having once undertaken her, I shall put it through, unless, of course”—with her little dry laugh—“you set your foot down, like Tom.”

“The comparison jarred upon him. She had meant it to do so, as a relief to her own ill humour, but not being one of those fortunate people who can indulge in pet vices, like indigestible dainties, without after ill effects, she expiated her ebullition by an instantaneous remorse, which, being unexpressed, did neither of them any good.

“Felicity gave one absolutely no data to go upon”—drawing from her pocket the brief note inserted in Miss Ransome’s letter by the warranter of that young lady’s general soundness. “‘Gay as a lark.’” She paused after the quotation, and Edward had a nervous dread that she was going to add the oft-repeated gloss, “When her mother died three months ago,” but for once she abstained. “‘Gay as a lark, and has been of invaluable assistance to me in my “Happy evenings.”’ Not a word else! not a hint as to her character, her tastes, her faults!{23}”

It was said in a perfectly innocent voice, as offering a plausible suggestion; but his wife knew that it was his revenge for Tom’s foot.

“B-r-o-o-m! Yes, there can be no mistake about it!” said Mrs. Tancred, recurring to and carefully verifying poor Miss Ransome’s stumble upon the path of orthography, and forcing her husband to verify it too.

He laughed with contemptible male leniency. “Do you think she will arrive riding upon it, like a witch?” His slight mirth was not infectious.

“I think that to our other treats we shall have to add that of educating her.”

“Oh, I would not bother about that!” replied he, departing from his golden rule of never offering advice to that consort, who had had so much longer a time to learn wisdom in than had been his portion. “I would not bother about that. Let her ride through life upon her broom, if it amuses her.”

“That may be your happy-go-lucky way,” replied she, crisply, “but it is not mine.”

Happy-go-lucky! He repeated the epithet over to himself several times, in the dogcart, as he sent his horse along the flat old coach road, liberal of margin, to Swinston station; while the idle question put itself to his intelligence, whether a compound word, of which neither of the component parts was true, could be true as a whole? Happy-go-lucky. He was neither “happy” nor{24} “lucky.” Could he, therefore, be truly said to be happy-go-lucky?

There was another traveller on the same line of railway, in the afternoon of that day, who made the hour’s journey from Paddington in a train that preceded the express which brought Mr. Tancred back from the City, and whose reflections, despite the lark-quality with which she was credited, were not much more rosy-tinted than his own.

“I wonder,” she said to herself, as her great eyes, that were no longer under any compulsion to look grateful, or affectionate, or docile, in the matchless freedom of an empty railway-carriage, followed the yellow-brick squalors of the sliding slums. “I wonder how long it will be before Edward puts his foot down in the same way that Tom did? Will it be a matter of months or weeks? Judging from the portrait good old Felicity drew of her sister-in-law, I should say it might be minutes! If old Tom had not been such an ass, I might have stayed with them for ever and a day, and it was not a bad berth! What asses most men are! and all what brutes! No, not all! Old Tom is not a brute! How kind he was on the day of the funeral during that horrible drive to Kensal Green! But what an ass! ‘I shall be at Paddington before you! God bless you, dear!’”

She chuckled a little, and the lark—a very sophisticated town lark—began to re-awake in her.

Presently, having the carriage to herself, she{25} left her seat and flitted to the opposite window, then back again, standing up to command the landscape better. Not that she had any taste for landscape, an appreciation of the beauties of Nature being as much a matter of education as spelling or ciphering, and possessed as little by the peasant as the dog. She knew that Italy or Switzerland expect to be admired; but that the tame, Alpless, templeless Berkshire, through which the G.W.R. was carrying her, could command any approbation would never have occurred to her, even though November seemed reluctant yet to tear from the pleasant countryside its red and sombre garment of autumn.

But though gifted with no love of the picturesque, Miss Ransome was endowed with plenty of alert curiosity, which grew sharper as the little diamond-set watch at her wrist told her that she must be nearing her destined station, and caused her to scan with a keener interest the “country seats”—in advertisement phrase—which here and there were indicated by a lodge visible from the line, or a gable peeping through red woods. She had not been informed as to the distance from Swinston to Stillington Manor. Any one of those half or quarter revealed houses might therefore prove to be her future home. If not, it might prove to be the home of a neighbour and acquaintance. Any one of those neighbours might possess an eldest son.

“Marriage is the only possible outlet for me,” she said to herself, relapsing into gloom, as her eye rested appraisingly upon the brand-new{26} machicolations of a pretentious mansion on a low hillside. “It is an odious one, yet there is no other; but whatever old Felicity may say, I will not have more than two children. If I have not a very good settlement, I will have none. Why should I bring any poor creature into the world to be a wretched little adventurer like myself?”

Never had the voice of her butler made an announcement less grateful to Mrs. Tancred’s ears. They were prepared for it, as the sound of the horses’ hoofs had penetrated to the morning-room, where she sat alone before her tea-table. But that sound had not been permitted to lift her spectacles—the pair most hated of Edward’s soul, with the thickest rims and the largest goggles—from her book. She would do her duty by the expected imposition when once it was laid on her shoulders, but that she should manifest empressement or pleasure in assuming the burden so brazenly shifted by Felicity from her own to Camilla’s back would be an offence at once against truth and decency.

Though Bonnybell had heartily dreaded and disliked the idea of her change of milieu, it had never occurred to her that the introduction to her new patroness would make her feel shy. Felicity kissed her upon arriving. A fortiori, Camilla would wish to kiss her, since in Miss Ransome’s experience the less attractive a human countenance was, the more anxious it was to approach itself to one’s own. She must be prepared for this, must{27} appear willing, if possible more than willing, to be embraced.

This had been her plan of campaign during the five-mile drive in the brougham, while clanking under the stone portico of the hall door, while passing through the evidently much-sat-in large hall, and being ushered into the morning-room opening out of it; but no sooner had her feet crossed the threshold of this latter, and seen the tall gauntness that faced her slowly rising from its seat and deliberately replacing its spectacles in their leather case, and awaiting her without one conciliatory inch of advance towards her, then, with lightning speed, she realized the impossibility of her project. Attempt to kiss that icy mask! Her buoyant step faltered, her ideas grew confused, only a hazy notion that her plan was a good one, and that she must carry out as much of it as was possible, still occupying her brain.

With merely this dim guide for her conduct, and becoming aware that she was now quite close to the grey-haired iceberg ahead, she dropped a little French curtsey, and laid a small, respectful, butterfly kiss upon the bony fingers held grudgingly out to her.

Mrs. Tancred snatched away her hand, though more in a sort of ferocious mauvaise honte than from any more hostile motive. It was so very seldom, throughout her fifty years, that any one had kissed Camilla’s hand. Edward had done so, fifteen years ago, as a graceful unmarried lad of twenty, in innocent acknowledgment of long hospitalities, and she had thereupon straightway{28} proposed marriage to him—that marriage which he had been too young, too grateful, and too much taken aback to decline.

Was it any wonder that, having such associations with the courtesy in question, Mrs. Tancred should mark her disapprobation of it with what, to the uninitiated, might seem needless emphasis?

To Bonnybell this miscarriage of her plan of action at its very outset brought a momentary paralysis, and she stood dumbfounded, while an awkward remorse for her reception of what, though silly and misplaced, might have been a well-meant civility, impelled Camilla to make a conciliatory remark to the effect that she was afraid the tea was cold.

“I like it cold,” replied Miss Ransome, with the sweetest promptitude and the most instantaneous rally.

The repetition of the polite assertion was merely because that ferocious shyness of hers did not suggest to Mrs. Tancred any more original observation; but the tone in which it was conveyed made Miss Ransome say to herself that “the old woman was even more terrible than she had expected.” No sign of this reflection appeared, however, on the dial-plate of her innocent face.

“I mean that I do not mind its being cold. I like to take it just as it comes.”

“Is that the way in which you like to take things generally?” asked the other, unstiffening into an involuntary smile.{29}

It was difficult to look at anything so small, so dewy, so palpably made of rose-leaves as Bonnybell’s face without smiling; and in addition to this impulse shared by the generality of her species, Mrs. Tancred had for her own portion that extravagant admiration of beauty which, unmixed with any tincture of spite, is the doubtful appanage of the frankly ugly and really good among women.

“I think one has to, more or less, don’t you think?” replied the rose-leaf with a pretty diffidence, as one not competent to hold an opinion with any tenacity in the presence of a person so far superior in wisdom to herself.

With a passing shudder at the slipshodness of the grammar displayed in the answer, coupled with a slight sense of approbation of the deference of its tone, and an inward reflection—somewhat the reverse of that lately made by its object—that the new arrival was not quite so impossible as she had expected, Mrs. Tancred thawed a little further, and put an almost friendly question as to the welfare of the couple whom her visitor had just left.

“Mrs. Glanville has a slight cold,” replied the other, with the glad glibness of feeling herself on safe ground, “but taking care of it, and I do not think it will be much. She caught it as we were coming out of the ‘Happy Evening’ last Thursday.”

For a moment Mrs. Tancred hesitated. Should she seize this early opportunity for beginning the projected education of her charge,{30} and point out to her that it is grammatically impossible to come out of a “Happy Evening,” or should she let the slip pass? Her rejoinder showed that she had chosen the weaker-minded alternative.

“Felicity tells me that you have been invaluable to her at the Recreation Hall.”

“I was so glad to be able to do any little thing to show my gratitude to her.”

The statement was certainly not untrue, but as certainly that was not the reason for its utterance. Veracity being a goddess who had never occupied a very high position in Bonnybell’s Pantheon, she said it because she thought that the jeune fille, up to whose character she was in these surroundings bound to try to live, should and would say it.

There was a faint accent of asking in what would otherwise sound like the assertion of a fact, and Miss Ransome stole a wily glance at her hostess. Did she know about Tom, or was she trying to find out?

Twenty-four hours later the girl would not have put this question even to herself, having long ere the expiration of that time learnt how little the indirect or circuitous entered into Camilla’s methods. Here was need for wary walking.

“Then the objection came from Tom?”—with an accent of very thinly veiled incredulity.{31}

But the cautious young stranger was not to be surprised into any such admission, nor did the fact that Felicity’s version of the circumstances departed somewhat widely from strict accuracy make it at all less easy to her young protégée to back it up.

“Of course, it must be a nuisance for any man to have a third person always en tiers with him and his wife,” she replied with a judicious generality. Then, divining from something in Mrs. Tancred’s face that the ground was not very firm under her, she skipped off it with a masterly agility. “That was what made it so overwhelmingly kind of you and Mr. Tancred to let me be sent here.”

The humility of the wording, with its plain implication that the speaker could never be regarded except as a burdensome parcel to be transferred from one pair of reluctant hands to another, and the guilty feeling that such had been precisely her own attitude of mind towards her, combined to mollify yet further the person at whom they were aimed.

“Edward and I are too old married people to have Tom’s eagerness for a tête-à-tête,” she said, with a hint of what Bonnybell suspected to be irony, “but”—with a smile that, though, like everything else about her, was unbeautiful, was yet not hostile—“I think it was kind of us!{32}”

CHAPTER IV

“They must have a chef,” said Bonnybell after dinner to herself, as she and Camilla began to tread back their path through the long enfilade of rooms that led from the dining-room to the library, where, accompanied by ceiling-high books, the small family apparently spent its evenings. “The cuisine is better than the Glanvilles’. I fancy that philanthropic women very seldom have good cooks. Yes, they have a chef! What a fool he must be to spend two-thirds of the year in the country!”

As she and her hostess stood by the fire, Miss Ransome’s reflections took another turn.

“What a gloomy room! Not a single photograph about! How much better those old ancestors would look taken out of their frames and draped in light-blue velvet, as poor Claire did ours before she sold them!”

Mrs. Tancred, with an evident intention of industry, sat down by a green-shaded electric lamp, and drawing a roomy work-basket towards her, extracted from it a large piece of homely plain sewing.

“Ought I to set a footstool for her, or is she{33} the kind of person who likes to do everything herself? Ah, it is as I thought,” as the diffidently offered support was rejected with the words—

“Thank you, my dear; but my legs are long, and I have no wish to have my knees knocking against my nose.”

“I am so sorry,” returned Bonnybell, humbly; “it is a silly habit that I have got into! Claire never could bear to be without a footstool!”

Mrs. Tancred’s seam remained suspended in mid air, the needle arrested in its journey, while through her spectacles her eyes, which looked far too penetratingly keen to need them, flashed in shocked displeasure at her visitor.

“Claire was my mother,” replied the girl, quailing, and crying to herself in a passion of self-reproach that she had made a colossal blunder on the very threshold; that, of course, the jeune fille does not allude to her mother by her Christian name.

“It was her own wish. She could not bear me to call her mother; she thought it dated her—of course, it did.”

Mrs. Tancred was silent for a minute or two. It would be unseemly to address to the daughter of the departed the vigorous epithets which alone sprang to her own lips in connection with that lady. Presently a suddenly risen hope set speech free again.{34}

“If those were Lady Ransome’s views, she probably did not care to have you much with her.”

“Oh yes, she did—sometimes,” replied the girl, slowly, and with a painful weighing of each word by the jeune fille standard. “She liked us to be taken for sisters; and when the light was not strong there really looked very little difference in age between us.”

Again there was a pause, the potent reasons of her deadness and her motherhood being scarcely potent enough to keep within the barrier of Mrs. Tancred’s lips the expression of her estimate of the scandalous author of Bonnybell’s being. Her next question in the constraint of its tone evidenced the violence done to her inclinations.

Bonnybell hesitated slightly. In point of fact, her sojourn in the Pension de Demoiselles in question had not outlasted a month; but “Toute vérité n’est pas bonne à dire.”

Reprobation of the implied selfish disregard of her daughter’s welfare had forced itself unconquerably into Camilla’s voice; and Bonnybell, who, with all her numerous faults, was not devoid of generosity, found herself unable to leave her{35} questioner in what would be for herself an advantageous error.

“It was not Cl—my mother’s fault,” she explained slowly; “Madame le Roy asked her to take me away.”

Again for a moment Bonnybell hesitated. Should she “give away” her parent, whom, after all, nothing could now harm, and tell the truth, seeing that it was on getting wind of that parent’s antecedents, and the estimate in which she was held by her countrymen and countrywomen, that Madame le Roy had requested the removal of her daughter? It was clear that at the present moment the girl’s new patroness was labouring under the perfectly natural error that it was for misconduct of her own that the young creature before her had been ejected.

“She thinks that I was kicked out for some amourette! Well”—the hesitation had not lasted more than five clock-ticks—“let her go on thinking so. If I had stayed another month, I dare say I should have been, and poor Claire is dead, and cannot take up the cudgels for herself.”

“Asked her to take you away?” Mrs. Tancred had laid down her spectacles; but though their glowering roundness had been frightening, the unshaded rebuke of the eyes behind them was distinctly more so.

The repetition of the sentence had taken so plainly interrogative a tone that it must needs be answered. In this case the jeune fille idea was of{36} no help. The jeune fille could never have been turned out of a boarding school, and Miss Ransome must be guided by her own lights. Since truth was never a sine quâ non with her, she might as well make out as good a case as she could for herself.

“I believe that Madame le Roy thought I was not making much progress—that another system of education might suit me better.”

A long practice in the art of fibbing had given Bonnybell a high degree of proficiency, and no one that heard this unhesitating utterance, and saw the unflinching though modest directness with which her eyes met those of her catechist, would guess how much larger a draft upon the girl’s imagination than her memory the explanation had made.

Camilla listened, uncomfortably puzzled. The reason given sounded ludicrously inadequate, yet the child’s whole air and manner was that of one telling the simple truth.

Mrs. Tancred had never had the advantage of living with a really good liar; and so dismissing all doubt of the unlikely fact recorded, her mind made a transition to the cynically amused speculation as to what the alternative system of education could be that taught its pupil to spell the word “brougham” as poor Miss Ransome had so lately been innocently guilty of doing.

Bonnybell’s thoughts meanwhile resolved themselves into the two distressed self-queries, “If she goes on like this much longer, shall I be able to help contradicting myself?” and, “Is it possible{37} that Edward is going to have the brutality to leave us to ourselves for the whole evening?”

It was not possible; or, at least, the dreaded contingency did not happen, and Edward himself followed soon, though saunteringly, upon the heels of his guest’s fears.

He stood for a few minutes with his back to the fire, not looking particularly at either of his ladies, but rubbing his foot gently over Jock’s reverse, that dog sharing the belief of many of his race, that the really civil way to receive a friend is to roll over on your back, and flourish all your four legs in the air at once, like waved hands, at him.

Bonnybell drew a breath of relief. How much lighter the atmosphere had grown since he came in! and one might relax the strain to remember what one’s last sentence had been, and to be sure that it did not contradict one’s last but one! Yet it seemed destined to be an evening of tête-à-têtes. Though the one whose prolongation she had dreaded was happily at an end, Miss Ransome soon found herself involved in a second one with her host himself.

Mrs. Tancred having been given a low-voiced message by the butler, from which the words “water-bed,” “gratitude,” “invaluable” dimly emerged, a message whose tail was brusquely cut off by the recipient of it, but which resulted in her hastily leaving the room, a peril of a different kind from her former one must await the visitor.

“Of course, now that she is clear off, he will begin to make love to me! Was I ever alone in{38} the room for five minutes with a man without his beginning to make love to me! Tom began the first evening. Happily I am a good way off!”

But apparently the manners and customs of the shady debauchees to whom Miss Bonnybell’s upbringing had acclimatized her, and from whom she generalized, formed no criterion for the conduct of the gentleman in whose company she now found herself. He did not change his attitude or his occupation by an inch, his foot still gently rolling the beatified Jock slowly to and fro, after the method that experience had taught him to be most acceptable. Neither did he speak.

Edward Ransome had never much flow of small talk, going mooning through that life whose circumstances forbade his ever giving open expression to his real feelings or true thoughts, in a sort of dreamy twilight of silence and self-suppression. He ought to say something to the dazzling anomaly that had seated itself by his dull hearthstone, but for the life of him he could not think what.

It was the anomaly who, surprised and relieved at his entire apparent innocence of the kind of enterprise with which she had credited or discredited him, saved him the trouble of initiating a subject.

“Am I sitting in your chair?” A movement just sketched with hasty grace towards leaving the seat she occupied accompanied the question.

“Oh dear, no!” in courteous distress at the suggestion. “I have not got a chair.{39}”

The words were nothing, but the tone carried such a delicate implication of interest in anything relating to his habits, coupled with a still more delicate fear of carrying that interest into intrusiveness, that Edward felt vaguely gratified.

“I mean that I have not any special chair which makes me inclined to growl as Jock does when another dog approaches the sacred confines of his basket.”

“Thank you for relieving my mind!” she answered gratefully. “I thought I might have taken it without knowing—one makes such stupid mistakes out of ignorance!”

There was a meek but not exaggerated thankfulness for his reassuring information in her whole air; and as if encouraged by his indulgence to gain further enlightenment, she went on—

“Has what?” He had lost sight of her queries in a dreamy enjoyment of her prettiness.

Both were smiling; he at the inquiring turn of her mind, she at his vagueness. Both looked at the lately vacated seat, and Bonnybell said with hesitating solicitude—

He shook his head. “It often happens. The village and the parson are perfectly conscienceless in their calls upon her.{40}”

There was what sounded like a regretful and rather affectionate admiration in his voice. Was it possible that he could like his old Gorgon? It was, at all events, safer to go upon the supposition that he did, and to shape one’s remarks accordingly.

“Mrs. Glanville spoke with the deepest admiration of Mrs. Tancred’s work,” the girl said in a very respectful tone, and executing her piece of embroidery upon Felicity’s real utterance with the deftest speed and readiness.

“Did she indeed?” replied he, in a key of high surprise, while his lazy eyes flashed a look at her, of whose keenness she had not supposed them capable, and which would not have disgraced Camilla’s own. “And yet their methods are not much alike.”

“You mean that Mrs. Tancred does not get up on platforms—does not speak in public?”

In her perfect darkness as to which mode of influencing the human race, his wife’s or his sister’s, most recommended itself to the husband and brother, Miss Ransome stole out her feeler with cautious colourlessness.

There was no emphasis laid on the denial of Camilla’s claim to puffed and self-advertised usefulness, and the answer might seem as colourless as the question, yet after its utterance no vestige of doubt remained in Bonnybell’s mind as to which of his female philanthropists’ methods Edward preferred. Perhaps he did not care much about either. Perhaps he was indifferent to or{41} averse from philanthropy at all. She might as well ask him. Men were so much easier to ask questions of than women.

She expected his answer with a flattering hanging on his words, but a slight frown creased his forehead as he replied—

“No, I do not do any good works—or bad ones either. I am a mere cumberer of the ground.”

There was a slight pause; she commenting inwardly upon his phrase, or rather upon a part of it—“no bad ones either.” I know how much of that to believe. “Qui s’excuse s’accuse!” Her amiable rejoinder, when it came, was gently playful.

The want of an answering smile, and the averting of his eyes, told her that the topic was not a gratifying one to him; that here was one of the men—almost unknown in her experience—who did not wish to talk about themselves; nor did she suspect that the gravity of his reception of her feeler was due to the slight sense of discomfort that one of her late carefully prepared sentences had produced. Why did she tell that unnecessary lie about Felicity’s admiration of Camilla’s work? She must have known that it was one!{42}

He was glad, and Bonnybell was not as sorry as she would have expected to be, when the door opened to admit Camilla. The latter was shortly followed by men-servants, who laid out a teatable—an evident survival from the, to Bonnybell, incredible period of Mrs. Tancred’s girlhood; and Jock, ceasing to make a fool of himself on the hearthrug, and knowing that the hour of pet-dog biscuits had come, trotted confidently up to the board. He did not know that in the unprecedented novelty whom he had carefully sniffed over, and finally acquiesced in, lay an enemy to his own peace.

“You do not mean to say that you let him have it for nothing?” cried Bonnybell, in animated remonstrance. “We never allowed our little Mimi to eat a mouthful without barking for it.”

“Was ‘little Mimi’ your dog?” asked Camilla, in a voice that, though carping at the silliness of the name, had yet a ring of true fellow-feeling in it.

“Yes, she was such a beauty. I do not know what Sir Alg—one of Cl—my mother’s friends—did not give for her.”

Thorny is the path of virtuous conversation. People did not talk of Sir Algernon, and she was within an ace of Claire-ing her departed parent again, and her audience was strictly silent; it expected her to go on, so she evidently must continue her narrative, trusting in whatever parody of Providence had hitherto guided her steps to steer her safely through it.{43}

“Mimi was twin-sister to the little dog that always drove in the Bois with Lolotte, sitting up in the victoria beside her, and dressed in the same colours and jewels as her mistress.”

Upon this query there followed another gasp; but this time it came from the causer of the first. Was it possible that there existed in the civilized world a benighted being who had not heard of Lolotte?—an establishment where she was as unmentionable as Sir Algy? The poor young creature, who became suddenly conscious of the terrible faux pas which her beautifully shod feet had taken, threw an agonized glance of entreaty for help at Edward. “You know Lolotte,” it said dumbly; “for goodness’ sake say something, and get me out of this horrible entanglement.” But Edward maintained a masterly, if cowardly, inaction.{44}

CHAPTER V

Though early hours—except in the topsy-turvy sense of seeing the sunrise overnight—had never entered into the scheme of Miss Ransome’s existence, and she was as little indebted to the lamb as to the lark for an example, yet never had clock uttered a more welcome sound than that single stroke of half-past ten, which made Mrs. Tancred, as if by machinery, fold up her large seam, restore it to its basket, and rise from her chair. The clocks at Stillington struck all together, for all were true to Greenwich as the needle to the pole.

“You are probably tired,” said the hostess; and the guest was reduced to such a jelly-like state of tremor and self-distrust that she did not know whether to acquiesce in or disclaim the accusation. If she admitted fatigue, Camilla would probably despise her; if she denied, it would very likely—judging by her past experience of husbands and wives—be looked upon as a manœuvre for procuring a tête-à-tête with Edward in the smoking-room. So she answered, with deferential hesitation—

It was a discomfiting way of taking a little meaningless courtesy, but at least it ended in landing Bonnybell in the blessed security of her own bedroom. For, except that there was nothing to speak of in the way of eatables and drinkables provided for the night—Mrs. Tancred being of the antediluvian race who suppose that people after an admirable eight-o’clock dinner do not need cold cutlets or quails to sustain them till morning—she found herself extremely, roomily comfortable; and having got into a dressing-gown, with more lace and openwork about it than Camilla would think quite moral, threw herself into an admirably stuffed armchair, to take stock of her own blunders, and ask herself whether they were quite irreparable.

“Oh, what would I give for a cigarette! but I suppose that that would about finish me. However many miles off her rooms may be, she would be certain to smell it, and it is too cold to smoke out of the window.”

Her thoughts went back regretfully to the many little pleasant evening smokes in old Tom’s den in Hill Street, when Felicity was safely away at some committee meeting. “It shall be as you wish. God bless you, dear!” She laughed out loud again, as she had done in the train.

Then her reflections took a graver turn. If it were possible to avoid it, she must not be turned out of Stillington, as she had been—however poor, good-natured old Felicity might try{46} to gloss it over—turned out of Hill Street. To avoid this undesirable result, one of the first and most urgent postulates was to ascertain, with the least possible delay, what topics of conversation were permissible and what tabooed in this extraordinary atmosphere of Puritanism and prudery. If she could make a friend of Edward, and quietly put her case before him? She dismissed the suggestion with a shrug. “If you try to make a friend of a man, he tries to kiss you!” This was a syllogism whose accuracy she had never had any reason to doubt. Valuable as enlightenment from a person who had had fifteen years’ intimate experience of Camilla would be, it was therefore wiser to abstain from seeking it, and to work out the problem by one’s own individual lights.

With elbows propped on the old chintz-covered arms of her chair, and eyes exploring the fiery caves of a grate as generously roomy as that chair, Miss Ransome made pass in carefully scanned procession before her mind’s eye the topics likely to present themselves on the morrow, sifting and winnowing the few thoroughly sound ones from among the wilderness of subjects likely, apparently, if treated with the ease and freedom which came natural to her, to lead to her speedy expulsion. “Felicity and Tom? H’m! doubtful. Felicity safe enough; but Tom?”

A process of elimination, conducted with a strictness of which this first beginning was an example, ended by leaving only three themes upon which the seal of complete security could{47} be set—the weather, the contents of the newspapers, with the exception of the Divorce Court, and Jock. Even in his case a rider had to be added, that under no circumstances was he to lead up to reminiscences of Mimi. But of the innumerable multitude of the tabooed, a trio were four-lined and three-starred. ‘Claire,’ her own past: especially anything referring to her education, and the demi-monde en bloc.

Having completed, at a late hour of the night, these dispositions for her future guidance, she betook herself to a high, wide, and admirable bed, while still sighing for a cigarette, and vainly hunting for sandwiches and whisky and soda.

If Bonnybell’s conversational infelicities had disquieted herself, they had produced a certainly not inferior effect upon one at least—and the most important—of her two auditors. It was not often that Camilla reappeared after retiring for the night, but the occasion was one worthy of the exceptional, and Edward was not much surprised by her advent in the smoking-room shortly after he had assumed his smoking-jacket, and established himself in his accustomed surroundings, to face a problem almost as difficult as that which was engaging Miss Ransome’s attention upstairs. He had rather that his wife had not broken through her usual habits, having a dim feeling that he was not ready to cope with her, and a less dim impression that her déshabillé was unnecessarily unbecoming.

Camilla was not one of the women who are{48} coquettish with their husbands, nor did she use any of the little pardonable juggles often indulged in by women who have wedded men greatly their juniors. Rather did she seem determined to underline and dash the fifteen all too obvious years that parted her from Edward. In the early days of their married life he had been wont gently to remonstrate, but it was now long since the hair, ruthlessly torn back from the already too high and bare forehead, and the tasteless, laceless woollen wrapper, had found and left him anything but silent and acquiescent.

To-night, the forehead seemed more naked and the peignoir woollier and drabber than usual. Mrs. Tancred did not sit down. Evidently no ease of posture could beseem such a crisis.

“I suppose that I am not imaginative. I wait for my eye and ear to inform me, before I realize things.”

“Your eye?” His judgment disapproved the protest, but the impress of Bonnybell’s beauty upon his brain was too strong and recent for him to be able to help it.

“Oh, I grant you that she is extraordinarily pretty!”—with a reluctant note of pleasure in the fact admitted—“prettier than a person has any business to be!” stamping relentlessly upon that weakness of hers for physical beauty which{49} her husband had always felt to be pathetic. “But what a girl!”

“Fin de siècle?” he asked, snatching at a phrase which in 1901 had lost its significance, but which he hoped expressed enough disapprobation to meet the requirements of the case.

“I never could see why the end of a century should justify immorality more than the beginning; but what a girl! what a plane of thought she moves on! what a moral standpoint!”

The man expressed no dissent. He could not conscientiously take up the cudgels in defence of Miss Ransome’s system of ethics, and to say anything in palliation of it would do her only disservice.

“What a girl! what a milieu! Sir Algernon Skipton! and Mademoiselle Lolotte!—unnamable men and unfortunates!”

This last well seasoned sentence did elicit an “Oh!” but it was as involuntary as the sneeze produced by an over-mustarded devil.

“Well, what else can you call Mademoiselle Lolotte, when she is translated into plain English?”

Edward did not call Mademoiselle Lolotte anything else, though a secret flash of amusement crossed his mind at the application of the homely word to the magnificent monarch of the Parisian Half World, as he had last seen her whizzing past in her motor brougham to Longchamps.

“You must remember that she has not had much chance,” he said, making his plea with temperate carefulness.{50}

The juxtaposition of the two names made him unaccountably angry; but the habit of self-government was strong, and did not now fail him.

Something, however smothered, of what he was feeling must have pierced through his tone, or else her own inward monitor rebuked her, for Camilla rejoined in quite a different key—

“That is true, and you are right to remind me of it; but”—with a relapse into consternation—“What a girl! She speaks of her dead mother by her Christian name as Claire!”

“H’m! She said that the mistress of the establishment thought that some other system would suit her better. It sounds like a lie, and a bad lie, but she looked as if she were speaking truth; indeed, I am almost sure that she was.”

A memory of the air of perfect veracity with which Miss Ransome had dilated to himself upon Felicity’s immense admiration for his wife’s form of philanthropy—an admiration of whose non-existence she must have been as well aware as himself—made it difficult to Edward to endorse{51} Camilla’s conviction; but he kept his difficulty, as he kept most things, to himself.

“If she speaks truth,” continued his wife, holding on apparently with desperation to the one rope thrown her by this possibility, “whatever awful facts she may tell us about herself—and, poor wretch, I suppose that she has not any others to tell—there will be hope for her, for us; there will be some basis to go upon; we shall know where we are.”

The supposition expressed was drawn from him involuntarily, and no sooner uttered than regretted.

His rejoinder was as disingenuous as his protégée’s would undoubtedly have been.

“I! Already! How is that possible?” His disclaimer was so completely successful that he felt compunction, and yet not so strongly as to regret having put his sleuth-hound off the scent.

“Oh, nothing of any importance. I was only going to suggest that whatever shortcomings you may discover in this poor little creature—and I dare say there will be plenty of them” (he despised himself for the concession, which he knew to be a bid for his wife’s leniency)—“we must remember her antecedents; we must try to make allowances for her.{52}”

She stood for a moment silent before him, her unbeautiful arms folded in her dull wrapper.

“Yes,” she answered dryly, yet assentingly. “Make allowances! It is a manufacture that for fifty years I have found phenomenally difficult; but you are right! one has no business to look for morals and manners in the Stews!”

He was used to the crudity of her phrases; yet now he turned with a quick movement towards the fire to hide the shudder that her old-fashioned vernacular, used in its present connection, caused him; but the accurate lyre-shaped clock on the chimney-piece above his head had ticked ten times before he could face his companion again with a controlled smile.

CHAPTER VI

As Miss Ransome was not aware of having made even the ally alluded to by Mr. Tancred overnight, it was with a very self-distrustful heart that next morning she appeared in the breakfast-room, to find her host and hostess waiting for her. It was one of the rules of Camilla’s old-fashioned code of politeness that it is as inadmissible to begin breakfast without a guest as to go in to dinner before he or she has appeared, and many a sleepy visitor had cursed this cruel civility.

Bonnybell had made what appeared to herself superhuman efforts to keep pace with the detestably unanimous clocks, that apparently, from every recess and landing-place in the house, admonished her of the flight of the minutes. For Claire and her daughter time had been not. Her apprenticeship in Hill Street had been neither long nor strict enough to uproot the habits of a lifetime; and though she had scamped her hair, and entirely omitted to underline her eyes, those eyes informed Bonnybell, on the authority of the relentlessly ticking accuser that faced her as she hurried in, that she was ten minutes late.

Edward offered her a choice of excellent{54} foods, and Camilla suggested that perhaps for the future she would prefer to breakfast in her own room.

She was about to accept joyfully the offer, when, just in time, some inward monitor—or was it a look on Mr. Tancred’s face?—warned her that it was sarcastic, and not meant to be taken seriously.

With trembling thanksgiving at having—and only by a hair’s-breadth—shaved the first pitfall set for her, she hastened to change the trend of her response.

Once again Edward looked at her, and something regretful in his eye made her feel that it would have been better to have been content with the refusal of Camilla’s ironical offer, and not to have added the ornamental mendacity at the end.

Having accepted coffee, and then wished that she had chosen tea, as being more English and less reminiscential of foreign ways, Miss Ransome ate her breakfast in a wary but smiling silence. Casting about in her mind for a safe and mollifying topic, her eye presently furnished her with one.

“What a beautiful portrait!” she said, pitching with inherited bad taste upon the only modern picture in the room.

“It has no business to be here,” replied Camilla, casting a brief and unadmiring glance upon the presumptuous intruder among a goodly{55} company of Antonio Mores, Cornelius Janssens, Romneys, and Gainsboroughs, “but my parents had it hung there, and I have naturally not liked to move it.”

The idea of Camilla ever having had parents, and not having issued directly from the bosom of Primeval Night, was so stupefying to Bonnybell that it kept her dumb long enough for Edward to throw in, as he did rather hurriedly—

“It is a portrait of my wife by Graves, given her, when she came of age, by the tenants.”

Furnished with this explanation, Miss Ransome’s eyes reverted to the object of an admiration which had originally been more polite than founded on conviction, and she chid herself inwardly for her stupidity in not at once recognizing that in the large-featured girl, whose sandy hair not even a courtly limner had been able to transmute into gold, lay the germ of the grim woman sitting beneath it. It was not yet too late to repair her error.

No comment followed this brave assertion, and its utterer thought it safer to go boldly on; but the want of conviction that she felt her statement had carried flurried her into a question from which her more deliberate judgment would have refrained.

The query was addressed and referred to the host, but it was the hostess who answered.{56}

“At the time that picture was painted, Edward was exactly six years old. There is a difference of fifteen years between us.”

A slight writhe upon Mr. Tancred’s part witnessed to the failure of his skin to have hardened itself against what yet must be a daily pin-prick, and Bonnybell, good-naturedly sorry for him, and still more concerned for herself at having floundered into so egregious a fault in taste, began a precipitate sentence which a look from Edward’s eyes converted into a for-ever unfinished fragment.

“No one would guess it!” was the complete form of the projected lie, but the phrase never got beyond its third word. In fact, Miss Ransome left the breakfast-table with not the slightest remorse indeed for the fibs, complete and inchoate, which she had perpetrated there, but with some misgiving as to their success.

It was contrary to what she would have expected, but yet the conviction came solidly home to her, as she pinned a veil with careful nicety over the chastened mournfulness and unchastened coquetry of her toque, that Camilla would be more easy to take in than Edward.

Miss Ransome was pinning on a veil at ten o’clock in the morning, not because her ejection had come thus early—though in her own opinion unlikelier things might have happened—but because it was Sunday morning, and she had been told that she was to walk to church with Mr. Tancred. There was apparently no question of Mrs. Tancred’s attending Divine Service.{57}

“You are not coming with us?” the girl had said with an extremely engaging moue of regret. “But I suppose that you do not feel up to it.”

“The long morning service lasts exactly one hour and ten minutes, and it is not because of its length that I do not attend it, but because I am not a member of the Church of England.”

“Oh!”—a little nonplussed by a momentary inability to think of a suitable comment; then, with a quick recovery, “Of course! So many of the oldest families are Catholics.”

“I am not a Roman Catholic either; but if you wait for me to expound my creed you will be late for church, and—I do not think that your hat is quite straight.” The words were snubby, but the speaker relaxed into an unintentional smile as she evoked them.

Of course, there was not the slightest foundation in fact for Bonnybell’s expressed regret, but there was a certain pleasantness in even the fiction, in even the false presentment and elusive shadow of a young thing belonging to one, and concerning itself about one’s comings and goings.

As to Miss Ransome, she skipped off, relieved, and with a humorous inward indignation at Camilla for not having perceived that her toque’s racy obliquity was intentional.

She found her escort waiting for her under the stone portico over the hall door, and casting a rather questioning eye up to a sky that did not answer very reassuringly.{58}

Of course she had not, the decorative in costume always engaging her attention to the exclusion of the useful. They were already a couple of hundred yards from the house, and he answered her suggestion of returning to fetch one by—

“I am afraid we are already a little late, and if it comes on to rain I can hold mine over you.”

“Of course he hopes that it will rain!” was the inward comment of the innocent creature to whom this assurance was addressed, and upon it followed a feeling of wonder at Camilla’s rash confidence, in trusting her husband to a tête-à-tête with herself.

But Camilla’s belief appeared to be going to be justified; for beyond a gravely cautious warning now and again to his companion to avoid a puddle, or indication of that strip of road which the night’s rain had left driest, Mr. Tancred walked along almost in silence, with the width of the elm avenue between them.

“Perhaps he would think it wrong to make love to me going to church!” thought the wary Bonnybell. “Men have such funny scruples. I must look out for myself going back.”

It was in a hansom while returning from St. Paul’s Cathedral that Tom had first told her that she could turn him round her little finger. There was no sign at present of Edward’s executing or intending to execute a like gyration, but it was always well to be on the safe side, and nothing{59} kept dangerous topics better at bay than a little safe small talk upon unimpeachable subjects.

There was a slight demur. To talk about her own past and its habits formed no part of Miss Ransome’s scheme; but after a moment’s hesitation she answered—

“She did not generally take me with her; she sent me with Tom—Mr. Glanville—instead.”

Bonnybell did not think it necessary to explain that towards the close of her unluckily shortened stay Felicity had deemed it advisable to alter this arrangement. Doubts such as she had already felt with regard to what the Tancreds knew or did not know of the Hill Street fiasco hurried her into a well-sounding expression of opinion.

The turn of the phrase amused him, and, against his intention, he showed it a little.

She repented the slip, but her hearer, glanced sideways at in fleeting apprehension, looked so lenient, that she took heart.

“We—Claire and I—were not generally up in time to go to church in the morning, and we mostly played bridge in the afternoon.”

Mr. Tancred gave a slight shudder of thankfulness—if a shudder can ever be thankful—that{60} this glimpse into the young stranger’s past had been revealed to him, instead of to his wife. To his thankfulness was added a prick of conscience, reminding him that he ought to chide the girl for her glib use of the forbidden Christian name. But he did not; and the civil, unrebuking attention with which he listened deceived her into fresh admissions.

“It was no question of liking,” she answered, with a lightning-quick realization that she had made a false step, and that for the future “Sir Algy” had better remain in the extreme background of her conversation. “I had to go; Claire would have been dreadfully hurt if I had objected.”

There was a moment’s pause. He must brace himself to the effort, odious and anomalous as it was, to tutor her.

“Would you mind—I must apologize a thousand times for my presumption in making the suggestion—but would you mind not speaking of Lady Ransome by her Christian name? I do not mind it in the least myself”—yielding to the relief of an emphatic assertion—“but it might shock some of these strait-laced people down here. I am not sure”—very reluctantly—“that my wife would like it.”

“I am sure she would not,” replied the object{61} of this rebuke, with a great candour, which would have disarmed her admonisher, if he had ever been armed. “In fact, I saw it by her manner last night. Of course, I ought not to call my mother ‘Claire,’ but it slipped out. The habit of a lifetime, you know. Well, ‘C’est plus fort que moi!’”

“Such a long lifetime, too!” returned he, with a gentle mocking of her absurd air of longevity.

“I should have been more on my guard with Mrs. Tancred,” continued she, in anxious explanation; “but with you I fancied it did not matter.”

He found a rejoinder to this speech difficult. He ought to have conveyed to her that he had no wish to be set on any different plane of intimacy with her from his wife, nor the least intention of being drawn into conniving behind Camilla’s back at what he knew that she disapproved. But long before he had found, even approximately, a form into which to cast this necessary snub, they had reached their destination. The church, standing on a little eminence above the slow midland river that slid through the park, was, from its small size and original destination, rather a chapel to the great house than a parish church.

“Is the music good? and do we come out before the sermon?” asked his charge, whispering.

He had to reply in the negative to both questions, and the slight but amusing twist that she gave her features on receiving his answer made him not as alive as he ought to have been{62} to the knowledge that she would not have dared to make that grimace in Camilla’s presence.

The Tancreds had a small side gallery, entered by a private door in the church, set apart for them, where for generations they had worshipped in comfortable apartness, owners and guests—with a superior view of the congregation—in front, and servants ranged in decorous rows behind.

To-day, as Edward had foreseen, they were late, and—the good old days of waiting for the entrance of the “Wicked Man” by the parson being gone—it was upon an assemblage of bent heads that Miss Bonnybell’s cautiously roving eye alighted. What a sparse congregation! and what an immense space separated her from Edward when each was ensconced in his and her distant corner of the long seat. That space was obviously intended to be occupied by a numerous progeny—Edward and Camilla’s family. She gave an irreverent inward chuckle at the thought of a row of prim little boys and bony girls fashioned in Camilla’s image.

Then a panic seized her. Was a visible smile, produced by this tickling idea, showing itself on her face, to be seen now that everybody was standing up again? At once she composed her features to an expression of devout melancholy, which, being—as she had not a glass whereby to regulate the amount—a little overdone, made Edward pityingly reflect, when he occasionally glanced at her during the sermon, that, despite that playful gaiety of disposition which broke out{63} every now and then, her terrible past had written its name indelibly upon her tiny features.

Those veracious indicators allowed themselves to relax a little from their pious gloom, as their owner lightly trod her homeward way, and cast about for something suitable to say regarding the service. If she could also obtain a little useful information by the way no harm would be done.

“I am glad you think so. But why did they strike you as so particularly nice?”

She thought it was a question that he need not have put, but took pains with her reply.

“Oh, they looked so homely, and attentive, and—and—un-smart. I liked them so much better than the London congregation I am used to. Felicity’s ‘Pope,’ as you call him, has all the mondaines and demi-mondaines too at his feet.”

“But I thought you did not sit under Felicity’s Oracle; I thought you told me that you usually went to church with Tom.”

Miss Ransome wished, with a momentary impatience, that her companion’s memory for her statements was not so good, as it might lead to inconveniences in the long run, but she answered readily—

“Latterly, Felicity usually took me with her.{64} Tom often had a cold or an engagement on Sunday morning.”

She laughed off further inquiries with her airy cynicism, and having the best reasons for preferring the rôle of questioner to questioned, began an indirect catechism concerning the congregation, whose motive Mr. Tancred did not suspect.

“It all seemed so patriarchal; everybody looked like tenants and farmers, and people of that class. I suppose your neighbours have churches of their own to go to?”

“John Drake?” She looked across the road at him with a sudden alertness of interest. Did John Drake sound like the name of the South African millionaire who was to pilot her out of her present slough of dependence and manœuvring to the odious but indispensable anchorage of marriage? “Who is John Drake? Is it very benighted of me never to have heard of him?”

The desire to keep his boots clean still apparently held in check the desire that Edward must experience to be near her, and it was across the width of the drive that his answer reached her.

“Not in the least; it would have been odd if you had. He is agent to a man who has a property near here.”

An agent! Miss Ransome had a distinct sensation of disappointment. But agent to whom? Perhaps her chance of promotion was only set one step further off.

“I dare say he will turn up to luncheon to-day.{65} My wife is always glad when he does. She thinks he has not enough to eat at home.”

“I dare say he has; but Camilla is convinced that when all the ten children are helped, there is not much left of the leg of mutton.” (Ten children!) “Poor chap!” continued Edward; then, checking his expression of compassion, “though I do not know why I pity him. He probably gets quite as much out of life as the rest of us”—with a smile. “He is a fair shot, and he used to play the ’cello a bit, but he has given that up; and I think that is nearly all about him.”

“How monstrous of anybody to have ten children!” she said with the shocked accent of a philanthropist hearing of a great crime.

He did not feel inclined to discuss the subject with her; and his silence recalled her to the consciousness that the turn of her phrase was not that of the jeune fille.

Ah, now we are beginning to get at something more promising! Sir Frederick Milward!—a well-acred baronet, perhaps, or preferably an industrial millionaire, knighted for judicious hospitalities in high places.

“Oh, fairly; but they are scarcely ever here. His wife is a neurotic; and the place—it is a dreary barrack at the best of times—is empty for ten months of the year.{66}”

In profound discouragement, Miss Ransome desisted from her queries. What a disgusting neighbourhood; everybody married, eating gory gigots à l’eau, and breeding like rabbits!

At luncheon Mrs. Tancred took away her guest’s appetite for the moment by asking her what the sermon was about, but dealt more gently than might have been expected with her total inability to reply, letting her off with the ironical hope that she had enjoyed her nap, and adding with that habitual grim justice which sentenced herself as uncompromisingly as others—

“You might fairly ask why, if I wished to know, I did not myself go to hear it?”

“I should be very much interested if you cared to tell me,” replied the culprit, with meek untruthfulness.

“I do not think you would,” rejoined the other, bluntly. “Anyhow, I have a creed, though I am quite sure that you would not make head or tail of it.”

Bonnybell received with joyful acquiescence this unflatteringly couched reprieve from a lesson in theology; and without the least inward or outward murmur the announcement that Camilla would not be visible before teatime. Later on she learned that it was the prosecution of her mysterious cult that kept Mrs. Tancred in austere study and Stoic meditation through the long hours. Though her husband did not share in her solitary devotions, it at first looked as if he were going to be as invisible as she.

A sense of desperation laid hold of the young{67} stranger on finding herself left alone, with the whole house, rich in artistic and historic interest, it is true, to range over, but with, in all probability, not a living soul to exchange a word with for two and a half mortal hours. She filched some violets and a tube-rose out of a vase, and pinned them upon her smart blackness, but she had to stand on tip-toe to get a good sight of herself in the beautiful Venetian mirror, evidently hung with a view to its own becomingness, not for the convenience of “rash gazers;” and the whole manœuvre, though she prolonged it by practising a variety of expressions that might come in useful by-and-by upon her face, did not occupy five minutes.

From among the wealth of books, new and old, that strewed the table, she picked up one, whose yellow paper back “faisait espérer des choses,” only to throw it down in disgust, since a very slight skimming of its pages proved it to belong to the literature of the jeune fille; and where a French novel is innocent, it is innocent with a vengeance.

She walked to one of the long windows. Should she go out? She decided not. Rain-charged clouds hung over the ruddy trees of the park. There was not the slightest chance in those miles of walks, whose beginnings she saw stretching hopelessly away in their odious privacy, of meeting any one not belonging to the place, and if you had to endure boredom it might as well be a dry and warm as a wet and cold one. She tried the pictures. They were all hopelessly{68} good, some dusky, some mellow, glowing and glooming from the harmonious dull-green brocade of their background. Why on earth didn’t they sell them, now that there was a “boom” in these dingy old masters, and hang something worth looking at on their walls? Her mind reverted admiringly to the canvases—how unlike these!—that had adorned “Le Nid,” Claire’s villa at Monaco.

Miss Ransome had not considered all her mother’s methods commendable, but surely her taste in pictures was perfect. Where had they all gone to now, those charming specimens of modern French art—“Le Bain,” “La Surprise”?

Her disparaging contemplation of the picture at which she was staring was broken in upon by the voice of Edward.

“It is hung too high,” he said, not guessing the spirit in which she was gazing. “I told Camilla so, but she is not fond of change.”

“People of her age seldom are, I suppose,” returned Bonnybell, radiant at her interrupted solitude, but at once feeling that she had said the wrong thing.

“We have always thought it a Dierick Bouts. Camilla’s grandfather brought it from Bruges,” he went on, in a tone that seemed to put him further away from her than his first remark had done. “Of course, when we sent it to a Winter Exhibition at Burlington House, the critics pronounced it a copy, but we took leave to disbelieve them.”

“I am sure you were quite right,” rejoined{69} she, with outward emphasis and an inward wonder why any one should care to discuss the paternity of such a grotesque old croûte.

“Since you are fond of pictures,” he said, “perhaps you will let me show you some rather good portraits in the morning-room. They are not all by any very well-known masters; but though their interest is chiefly historical, they are not badly painted.”

She acquiesced gratefully. Any change from her late forlorn condition of being thrown on her own resources must be for the better, and if she pretended to be interested in his old daubs, she might be more likely to retain his company.

They had reached the morning-room, and Tancred held back the heavy curtain from the nearest window, to let a larger measure of the niggard daylight of a November afternoon fall upon the object he was exhibiting.

“That is Sir Thomas Overbury; it was given by him to a cousin of his who married an ancestor of my wife’s. That”—indicating another portrait—“is Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset. There is a grim irony in hanging them cheek by jowl, isn’t there?”

“Very grim,” returned she, and called inwardly upon her gods for help in enabling her to disguise how little she knew why it was grim, or why there was any question of irony.

“And that is Somerset’s wife”—pointing to a good female portrait by Van Somers. “I always{70} think she has such a deceptive face; one would never read her story in it, would one?”

This was perfectly true, since Bonnybell had not the foggiest notion of what the illustrious murderess’s story was.

The “of course” was redundant, and a mistake. It made him look at her in slight surprise, and with that look dawned upon him the fact that never before had Miss Ransome “heard tell” of any one of the three notorious personages to whose effigies he had just introduced her.{71}

CHAPTER VII

After that, being a merciful man, Edward let her get off the historico-artistic gridiron, upon which he had been innocently grilling her. He showed her no more pictures, nor, indeed, anything else except his smoking-room, in which she exhibited a lively, and this time perfectly unfeigned interest, and where her intelligent inquiries as to the brand of cigars favoured by him, and her discriminating knowledge of the subject in contrast to her abysmal ignorance of the former ones, taught him that hers had not been a past of mere cigarettes. She had nourished a faint hope that he might have invited her to share a friendly whiff there and then, but it was clearly not to be. Instead, he gently ejected her. “Of course, the old camel would smell it,” said the disappointed young creature, inwardly feeling a sensible relief in this ingeniously insulting play upon the name of her latest benefactress.

Edward had escorted her back to the very spot where he had found her, opposite the calumniated Dierick Bouts; and with despair she saw, or thought she saw, in his eye an imminent intention of leaving her. What could she do to arrest him?{72} Rush at once into some entanglingly interesting subject which would rob him of that wish to escape which it was so incomprehensible that he could ever have nourished? Ask him why he married Camilla?

She was saved from a remedy which would certainly in its results have proved worse than the disease, by the object of her solicitude.

“I am afraid,” he said, looking first compassionately at her and then rather helplessly round the room, as if in puzzled search among its wealth of beautiful objects and inviting books for something capable of amusing her—“I am afraid that you will be very dull all by yourself.”

The inevitable civil falsehood—inevitable, at least, to the ever-lying Bonnybell, followed.

“Yes, really; that is to say”—in terror that he might be obtuse enough to believe her—“that is to say, I love it generally.”

The implication that she did not love it on this particular occasion was so piteously apparent, that humanity forced him to throw a rope to her.

She glanced through the window. It would have been much more consonant with her views of the right way of spending Sunday to have sat blowing delicate clouds through her nose and picking his brains over the smoking-room fire, but that was a blue rose.

“What do you recommend?” she asked with a smile that looked persuadable.{73}

Mr. Tancred’s propositions were mostly put interrogatively. He had not enough value for his own opinion to assert anything with dogmatism, having fifteen years earlier set up so robust a self-contempt as still showed no signs of wearing out.

“Be rash, then.” She was still smiling anxiously, divided between a lurking fear of mud and a horror of solitude.

“I wonder,” he suggested, still tentatively, and eying doubtfully the towny elegance of her garb, “whether you would care to walk with me as far as what we call the Dower House?”

“Is that where you keep your dowagers?” she asked playfully, but with an inward misgiving as to the proposed treat being “good enough.”

“It is where Camilla’s people used to keep them,” replied he, with that careful dissevering of himself, which Bonnybell so often afterwards noticed, from his wife’s possessions; “but as she is the last of the Tancreds, it will not be needed again.”

“The last of the Tancreds!” repeated she, with an accent of surprise. “I thought that Tancred was your name?”

“No,” he answered in that ill-at-ease voice with which he—and that as rarely as might be—alluded to his marriage. “I gave mine up when I married.”

“I hope she made it worth your while,{74}” was the worldly wise reflection of the listener; but on her sweet little face appeared only the expression of an intuitive sympathy. The subject was evidently not a much-relished one; and yet it would be disagreeable to her companion to see that she had discovered the fact; it must be gently glided away from.

“So I am to be taken to see an empty house—four bare walls?” she pouted, with a charming protrusion of her nether lip.

“On the contrary, the friends to whom Camilla has lent it while their own house is being rebuilt find themselves inconveniently thick upon the ground.”

“Are there ten of them? and do they live upon gigots à l’eau?” cried she, alluding to what he had told her of the full-quivered land-agent on their way home from church.

“No, there are only three young Aylmers—only two at home, unless Toby came back last night.”

That decided her. “I should like it of all things!” she cried. “May I come as I am, or must I make myself frightful, à l’Anglaise?” She held her arms straight down a little way from her sides and “invited inspection.”

“I think, if you go as you are, the brambles in the wood will not leave you many of those jingly things.{75}”

Being much more innocent-minded than she, and accustomed to much more cleanly company, he had not the dimmest suspicion that his mention of the harmless coppice in question had re-aroused her misgivings. They had been almost completely lulled by his demeanour hitherto; but had he been acting all this while? Had his cool and distant friendliness—so improbable in the face of all her experience of men—been assumed only to lead up to this ominous wood? It could be safely said that with not one of Claire’s and her own former intimates would she have for an instant thought of trusting herself in a shady grove.

The thought that his apparently harmless proposition implied an intended enterprise of the usual sort inspired her with no particular disgust. He would only be acting after his kind. All men were alike. This formula, from which she had hitherto had no cause to make any exception, covered with its contemptuous generality her whole masculine acquaintance, actual and possible.

“Well, does the wood frighten you?” he asked, with a slight and most unsuspicious laugh at the perturbation and doubt written in her face. “What do you think will happen to you in it?”

If she answered him truly—which, to do her justice, was the last thing that she had ever any temptation to do—he would probably think it{76} necessary to pretend indignation, and go off in a huff without her, so she temporized.

“It only just struck me that possibly I might be out too late; that Mrs. Tancred might want me.”

“Camilla never wants any one on Sunday afternoon,” returned he, with a sort of compassionate amusement at the idea of his wife ever “wanting,” or doing anything but groan under, the society of her little incubus; “and besides, it was her own suggestion.”

There was no more to be said, and, remarking to herself in derisive gaiety, that “There is no fool like an old fool,” Miss Ransome skipped off to make grudging modifications in her costume.

“Toby would have preferred me as I was,” was her final verdict on her own reflected image; “but I have no doubt that I am good enough, and too good for him, as I am.”

The Dower House stood in the park, sundered by a mere green mile from the great house, so that the departed dowagers had been able clearly to view the scene of their ended importance, and to contrast their successors’ methods unfavourably with their own. It was of such roomy proportions as to suggest the idea that it had been planned by some foreseeing lady, providing cannily for her own days of deposition. Not having been porticoed and stone-faced, as its parent-building had been in the days when you were compelled to inhabit a sham Grecian temple, or forfeit your self-respect, it retained those modest{77} Tudor charms of old red brick and twisted chimney-stacks, which, fashion having happily wheeled them round again into favour, might chance to remain unmutilated during our little day.

The dreaded “wood” was nothing more than the skirt of a large covert, and was easily traversed in five minutes. Although a cautious inquiry as to its length had elicited this fact, Miss Ransome quickened her pace as she entered the shade, which the still adhering leaves on the trees, and the quickly lessening daylight of a November afternoon, rendered thick and almost more than dusk.

Her companion noted with innocent surprise her nervous haste, and again asked her what she was afraid of, adding, with perfect unsuspiciousness that he himself was the cause of her fear—

“There is rather a boggy place just ahead of us in the path; I must have it looked to. Shall I give you a hand?”

She refused softly, but with such decision as provided him with a lazy sense of entertainment at the independence of her spirit, which was only equalled apparently by her absolute indifference to, and unconsciousness of, any of the sights and sounds of Nature. There was nothing very striking, it is true, in a Berkshire park—“as flat as a denial or a pancake”—on a winter afternoon, and he should not have been surprised that the lightly speaking voices of birds, whose songs were long since over, should hit unnoticed her sophisticated ear; but that the glorious colours which still{78} stained the noble trees, that the wonderful eyebeam which the sky—smoke-coloured all day—shot from under lifted lids in good night to whitening grass and copper and rust-tinted bracken, should be apparently entirely invisible to her, gave him a slight shock. He pointed out to her one superb effect of interlacing tints, but did not repeat the experiment.

She was too civil and too anxious to please not to respond with a perfunctory superlative “Yes, too delightful!” but in a moment had dropped back into her chatter about people, a chatter which circled round the family to whom she was on her way to be introduced, and which contained exhaustive, though circuitous, inquiries as to why “Toby” was “precious.” She must know before his presentation to her why and to what extent “Toby” was “precious.” Was it merely the usual dull British adoration of the solitary male of an over-feminine family which made him so? Or was it that he was heir to something so considerable as to render his life of importance to his family stem? Also, why were they rebuilding their house?

By the time she had reached the nail-studded oak front door of the Dower House, both questions were set at rest in her mind. The house was being rebuilt, because, through the carelessness of a housemaid, it had regrettably been burnt down; happily, however, the original plans had been found, and it was being rebuilt, stone for stone, as Sir John Vanbrugh had first erected it.{79}

Bonnybell had never heard of Sir John Vanbrugh as either architect or playwright, but she ejaculated fervently, “What a blessing!” and reckoning up mentally the sum of the information given her, said to herself, with a thankful heart, as she followed the servant into the hall, that Toby was well worth her nicest attention.{80}

CHAPTER VIII

The planting of Miss Ransome’s siege-train could not be at once taken in hand, as a rapid gallop of the eye over the unknown persons that the room contained showed that not one of them answered to the description which she had extracted from Mr. Tancred, with many precautions in the manner of doing it, of Toby. She made out a mother at once, and an elder sister, and an elder sister’s friend, though at first not quite sure which was which of the two latter, and a couple of elderly men.

As the electric light was not turned on, and the oaky gloom of the room was lit by only a fire that, though generous, was unequal in its distribution of light, Miss Ransome did not immediately realize the additional presence of a large female figure in outdoor dress, pelotonnée in an armchair in a corner. The sight of a motor-car at the hall door had shown that there must be other callers besides themselves, but the girl had forgotten the unimportant fact. It was brought back to her with a jump.{81}

She was halfway through her presentation to the family, executed in her very nicest jeune fille manner, when officious servants, turning buttons, flooded the room with light and set her staringly face to face with her past. It stood opposite to her in the shape of the large dim figure—alas! no longer dim, but revealed in bounteous outline, pigeon-egg pearls, ruddled hair and sable toque, which at the sound of her name precipitated itself out of its chair to look at her.

“Bonnybell Ransome! Is it possible that it is Bonnybell Ransome—poor Cl—oh, of course!”—recalled by the chic woe of the daughter’s hat to the fact of the extinction of that former acquaintance, of whose name nobody, apparently, not even Lady Tennington, dared now pronounce more than the two first letters.

For a moment—since this was a contingency which the most foreseeing could not have guarded against—Bonnybell stood mute and aghast. Was there ever such a stroke of ill luck? Flora Tennington, who knew all about everything! Flora Tennington, so intimately associated with poor Claire’s disastrous career—with all but the last year, that is! That last year had choked even Flora Tennington off! She had held on as long as she could—one must say that for her—and she had tried, yes, tried hard to stem the flood of those dreadful champagnes and brandies and chlorals. Her failure had been the occasion of the final rupture, and then she, too, had disappeared. She was not a bad friend, to do her justice. She had gone on speaking to the{82} unnamable Sir Algy long after he had sunk quite out of social sight; but, all the same, what extraordinary ill luck that she should have reappeared in these surroundings! She had always had the character of being bonne enfant, but she would be more than human if she resisted the temptation to tell all she knew—and all was such a very great deal, even without that last year—of poor Claire! And if she did, what, pray, would become of Toby?

It did not take more than five seconds for this chain of actual and possible misfortune to dart through Bonnybell’s brain, nor for her to recover her presence of mind.

“What a delightful surprise!” she said with a sweet blush of pleasure, holding out a glad little black hand.

“Do not put out your hand,” cried Lady Tennington, precipitately; “she’ll fly at you if you do. Lisa never allows any one to touch me.” If this were true, Lisa must in past years, if report lied not, have had her paws full.

A low growl, a glimpse of age-whitened muzzle, and a struggling chestnut-coloured body revealed the presence, under her mistress’s arm, of a small dachshund. Here was another voice from the past.

“Lisa!” cried Bonnybell, hardily putting out her hand to stroke the little angry, faithful head. “Is Lisa still alive?”

There was an affectionate inflexion in her voice, which Edward, though listening with one{83} whole ear to his hostess, caught, and recognized as an unknown note. Art was non-existent for her, Nature invisible to her, but she understood and appreciated dogs.

“And why should not she be alive, pray?” inquired Lisa’s owner, sharply, her sensitiveness about her dog’s age being even superior to that which she manifested with regard to her own. Then, with a reverting to her original key, “And what, in the name of Fortune, my dear child, brings you here?”

The little buzz of greeting was over, followed by a momentary silence among the rest of the party. Not a soul in the room but must have noticed the exaggerated emphasis on the personal pronoun, and have drawn the inevitable inference that to meet Miss Ransome in a respectable house was an experience that must take away any one’s breath. The wings of the not yet seen Toby were already spread for flight. Who could have anticipated that the egg of that bright prospect would be addled almost before it was laid? These thoughts were coursing through Bonnybell’s brain, even while she was murmuring her answer in a tone calculated in its hesitating meekness to deprecate any further showing up.

“I am staying with Mr. and Mrs. Tancred. They are good enough to let me pay them a little visit.”

The rejoinder was a rather discomfited “Humph!” a humph which had no need to have any light thrown upon it for the rest{84} of the company, but which was interpreted only later to Bonnybell, when she learned that Camilla had never shown any sign of a knowledge of Lady Tennington’s presence in the neighbourhood, nor, large as was her circumference despite French corsets and massage, any appearance of seeing her, when they had met on neutral ground.

There was a slight pause; the matron digesting the unintended snub, and the maid quakingly asking herself what she could say next best calculated to stop the flow of Flora’s reminiscences! Rescue came from an unexpected quarter.

“Miss Ransome is very much understating our hopes,” said Edward, in a slow voice of measured courtesy, through which any one who knew him well could trace some sort of smothered exasperation piercing; “my wife and I count upon her to stay with us indefinitely.”

Had he already caught from his young protégée the faculty of glib lying? He knew perfectly that he was saying the thing that was not; that there was nothing in the world which Camilla ambitioned less than to have her present guest as a permanent inmate; but the impulse of partisanship of bucklering one so exposed to the world’s cruel shafts conquered the lifelong instincts of veracity in an almost invariably truthful man. He was rather shocked when he realized what he had done; yet he did not repent. His own espousing her cause would be worse than useless to her, but his wife’s, with her fifty years{85} of almost awful rectitude behind her, was a name to conjure with.

Flora gave a little chuckle—not ill-natured, for she was never ill-natured, but helplessly tickled at the idea of the rigid Pharisee who had cut her for thirty years taking to her bony bosom the progeny of poor Claire—poor Claire, of all people!

“Then I hope we shall see something of each other,” she said bravely, ignoring her own relations, or rather want of relations, with the Tancred family. “I will send the motor over for you. You used to like motoring in the days when poor Al——”

She broke off. Not even she, with all her social courage and no character worth speaking of to lose, dared pronounce more than the first half of the submerged one’s name.

Before Bonnybell could frame a judicious answer to this discomfiting invitation, her hostess came to her aid. She had not caught Miss Ransome’s name with any precision, mumbled as names always are mumbled by English people on introduction, and perhaps even more so on the part of Edward than was usually the case, from the consciousness that it was not a patronymic warranted to ensure a welcome for its owner. Mrs. Aylmer only saw a remarkably pretty and evidently very young girl looking confused and miserable, though trying with the greatest civility to hide it under the avalanche of Lady Tennington’s questions and invitations. Of course, a decent girl could not possibly be allowed, and{86} evidently had no wish, to accept the latter; and, being a warm-hearted woman with a motherly heart going out to the slender black figure standing to be baited by the shocking old demi-rep, whom she so unaccountably seemed to know, the hostess hastened to extricate her from the tight place in which the poor child found herself.

“I wonder,” she said, looking kindly at the young stranger, “whether you would care to join the schoolroom tea? My children like it so very much better than ours.”

“I should love it!” replied Bonnybell, fervently, throwing an eyebeam of unmistakable gratitude out of her enormous eyes at her saviour, and thinking with intense inward self-congratulation upon how admirably in the teeth of hideous difficulties she must have played the jeune fille this time. Oh, if she could only keep it up! If only she could have seen Flora Tennington safe into her motor before her own exit! could—failing that—have had any trust in Flora’s reticence!

It remained to be seen what the schoolroom had to show. Its possibilities, at all events, could not include another Flora, nor could any of the disreputable men whose images rose with such unwelcome vividness upon Miss Ransome’s mind, recalled by the sight of Lady Tennington, by any possibility have crossed the scholastic threshold on whose other side a governess with a pince-nez and an assured manner, and a tall diffident girl in a pigtail presently greeted her. The third perso{87}n’s salutation could scarcely be called a greeting, as it consisted merely in his standing up, stopping eating quince jam, and looking thoroughly annoyed at having to do either. The governess revealed herself on presentation as Miss Barnacre, and the leggy young Miss as Meg.

In the case of the third person, presentation, though it took place duly, was superfluous. If induction had not, intuition would have taught Miss Ransome to recognize in the sullen consumer of interrupted jam the magnet that had guided her tender feet through the puddly park of a November twilight. He conquered his indignation at her intrusion enough to set her a chair at the command of Miss Barnacre, who followed up the attention by asking her a series of patronizing questions, adapted to the intellect of a child of four years. Miss Barnacre was of the new type of instructress, that type which sometimes makes its employer privily regret its down-trodden predecessor, victim to melancholy and indigestion; that new type which, fortified by all the rites of Girton, condescends to the parents of its pupils, chaffs and lectures their brothers, and inspires adoring awed friendships in their elder sisters; that type which differs as much from the early Victorian one as does the pert houri in “bang” and streamers who commands at our sick-bed side from the classic figure of Mrs. Gamp.

Bonnybell responded with meek submissiveness to the elementary catechism so glaringly adapted to her comprehension, and consoled herself for the time wasted upon the governess by{88} the philosophic reflection that she might gain more by being seen and heard in the case of so obvious a cub as Toby, than by being brought into more direct colloquy with him.

Miss Barnacre interrupted her own questionings at last, to give a brusque order to the young man to ring the bell, and it was now the turn of the eldest daughter of the house.

“Lady Tennington is an old friend of yours?” she asked quite pleasantly, and with a curiosity that was well within the limits of the courteous and permissible; yet in which the young stranger divined an inevitable surprise.

Her answer must be cautious, yet not hesitating. To repudiate intimacy with Flora would be—shabby?—yes, but that might pass at a pinch, but it would also be useless.

“She was very kind to me when I was a child,” answered the dear little voice, with a deprecating gratitude in its tones; “and she was at school with my grandmother.”

“With your grandmother!” repeated Miss Aylmer, in a key of rather gratified discovery. “Oh, then she must be much older than——” The speaker broke off; but it was not difficult for the hearer to supply the missing “than she pretends.”

“My grandmother would not be so very old if she were alive,” replied Bonnybell; “Claire was only thirty-four when she died.”

The name slipped out headlong, all Miss Ransome’s wariness being unfortunately on duty in another direction. Every one looked puzzled, not{89} having the slightest idea as to who “Claire” was, nor how her early death affected the age of the young stranger’s grandmother.

“Lady Tennington is very bien conservée, isn’t she?” continued the girl, hurrying away from the too-late-realized blunder; “and though she looks a good deal made up, it is really more face massage than anything else. We—I know her masseuse! We often employed her. She was the best in Paris.”

There was a slight silence, as of a company taken aback. Every eye involuntarily rested on Bonnybell’s lovely bloom, each looker asking himself or herself distrustfully whether it and the exquisite seventeen-year-old contour were due to mysterious French rubbings and unguents?

“She has not been very long in the neighbourhood; we know her only very slightly,” said the elder Miss Aylmer, presently, with an air of reserve, and the subject was felt to be closed. The never-to-be-defeated governess at once replaced it by another.

Of course, it was not true; but equally of course Toby would think the better of her if he could picture her stumping through wet vegetables by his side. Her ideas of all sport, except racing, were of the vaguest.

“I believe that she does not like to be disturbed; she shuts herself up to study.”

“She always interests me,” said Miss Barnacre, as if making an announcement that was advantageous to its object. “There is something stimulating to the curiosity in those resolutely solitary thinkers; but I cannot quite make her out. I used to think that she had leanings towards Hegelianism.”

“Had she?” returned Bonnybell, faintly, asking herself, with a sick heart, whether Hegelianism—whatever it might be—was one of the properties that no jeune fille bien élevée should be without. Let it be what else it might, it was certainly a word of ill omen, for no sooner was it pronounced than Toby pushed back his chair with such cruel violence that it fell over backwards, and left the room, shutting the door noisily behind him.

“In some respects I fancy she is nearer Esoteric Buddhism,” continued the governess, fixing her unescapable eye upon the victim of her horrible suppositions. “I must tackle her upon the subject.”

“I am sure that she will be delighted,” murmured Miss Ransome, with the greatest outward demureness, and a malicious inward wish that her tormentor would put her threat into execution and “tackle” Camilla. There could be little doubt as to the issue of the combat. Her own ardent personal wish now was to escape before revealing some damning and irretrievable ignorance.

“Do you think that Mr. Tancred is waiting{91} for me?” she asked, turning, with pretty deference, to Miss Aylmer, whom she thought much more worth propitiating than the pushing propounder of odious riddles.

“You need not be in any hurry,” replied the other, with a pleasant smile, that yet seemed to have a touch of superiority in its deeper knowledge of Edward’s habits. “Mr. Tancred always pays us a good long visit on Sunday afternoon; but if you had rather go back to the hall——”

Bonnybell’s hesitation was of but two seconds’ duration. Barnacre and Hegelianism, or Flora and Sir Algy? If these were her only two alternatives, unpleasant as was the first, it was undoubtedly the least objectionable of the two.

“I am very happy here,” she said with soft civility, “if I am not in the way.”

She glanced appealingly across at the pigtailed Meg, in whom she seemed to divine less of neck-and-crop absorption in the utterances of the governess and more of covertly admiring interest in herself than was the case with the elder sister.

“May I help you to look at your picture-paper?” she asked, and took the acceptance of her appeal for granted, crossing the room to the side of the young girl, who was shyly holding the leaves of the journal in question, so as to be able to peep over its sheets at the startling stranger. The shyness in this case was not of the brutal, chair-oversetting, bolting character of the brother, and was compatible with honoured gratification, as was evidenced by the room readily made, and the paper hospitably spread open.{92}

Miss Ransome’s first need was to suppress the expression of contempt which sprang to eyes and lips at the mawkish character of the publication; but to a really well-trained mind even Our Girlies can be made to provide nutritious pabulum. The portrait of a lady, surrounded by prize-taking Schipperke dogs, was the text provided on this occasion for Bonnybell’s instructive discourse.

“Lady Cressida Beaulieu!” she read, then added elucidatingly, “She used to go to the same coiffeur in Paris as we. She has thirty wigs; and he told us that hardly a week passed without one of them coming over from London to be refrisèd, or done something to.”

Bonnybell laughed, her little bubbling, innocent laugh, that often swore so piquantly with the themes that called it forth.

The other looked incredulously at the putter of this question. Is it possible that ignorance of the simplest facts of nature and civilization could be so crass?

“She had not a farthing; and Reggy Beaulieu ran through the little he ever had before he married.”

Miss Meg’s eyes were opening rounder and rounder in riveted interest at each fresh stroke added to the portrait of the lady of the Schipperkes.{93}

Bonnybell laughed again. “It is not very difficult. Of course, everybody knows that Waddy, the indiarubber-tyre man, runs her.”

“Yes; dresses her, finds her in diamonds, pays for her motor and her house in Grosvenor Street.”

It was a pity—at least, one of the interlocutors thought so—that so surprising, puzzling, and exciting a dialogue should be brought to a premature close; but ere Bonnybell could finish one more illuminating sentence, “Oh, I dare say there is no real harm in it; it is merely a matter of mutual convenience. Waddy pays and Cressida introduces him to——” the place at her other side was occupied by the elder Miss Aylmer, and Miss Ransome’s promising pupil disappeared on a message, to return no more.{94}

CHAPTER IX

Too late the poor little stranger realized that even such truisms and commonplaces of conversation as the relations of climbing millionaires and smart women for their mutual weal had no place in the wretchedly limited conversational répertoire of the well-brought-up young girl. It was a very flat and flagging conversation that replaced her lucid word-paintings, for which she, too late, felt that the Dower House schoolroom was not the place, and with a very unfeigned relief she received the message sent up by Mr. Tancred, a message of inquiry as to her readiness to depart.

Readiness to depart! There could be little doubt as to that! The state of mind expressed in that hackneyed line, “Ready to go, but not afraid to stay,” had certainly no reference to her; she was horribly afraid to stay.

Miss Barnacre shook hands with her with brusque manliness, and uttered a condescending and rather dry query, which did not seem eager for an affirmative answer, as to her making a long stay in the neighbourhood.

Miss Aylmer politely accompanied her downstairs. The party they had left in the hall was{95} diminished by two. Flora Tennington and her attendant swain were gone. Perhaps, after all, it would have been the lesser of two evils, though at the time for decision it seemed much the greater, to have abode below; at least, there would have been no danger of corrupting Flora’s mind, and, judging by the undiminished kindliness with which the hostess bade her good night, and the heartiness with which she invited her to repeat her visit, Lady Tennington must have judiciously suppressed all that was damaging—and, when you came to think of it, how little there was that, according to these people’s standard, was not damaging—in Miss Ransome’s past. Flora was always a “good old sort.”

While Bonnybell was accepting with dove-like coos of gratitude the hospitable offer made her, Mr. Tancred was having a word apart with the daughter of the house. Their taste for each other’s society had been long so patent in its perfect and harmless openness, that their acquaintance had grown tired of giving them to each other en secondes noces. He was now testing her friendship, and trying delicately and tactfully, but still with a bias which was quite apparent to her, to extract some favourable judgment upon his new protégée from this tried comrade. As a rule, their opinions coincided with curious nicety; and in the girl’s family circle it had become a proverbial phrase that what Edward Tancred said Catherine would always swear to. The nearest thing to a compliment that she produced was the ejaculation, “She is amazing!” If the adjective{96} was used in a flattering sense, it was too big for the occasion, and if it was not?

“Amazing?” he repeated, conveying a question with the repetition of the word, adding, as no explanation seemed forthcoming, “Amazingly pretty, do you mean?”

“She is that too, of course,” replied his friend, without excessive haste to make the admission, yet, in accordance with her character, making it conscientiously all the same. “But that was not the sense in which I meant to apply it.”

He knew that it would be wiser not to press her further; that after such an exordium no good for Bonnybell could come out of this Galilee, yet he heard himself say—

“I am not good at defining, and besides, I think that before long you will find out for yourself,” she answered, her smooth, fair face, which, as all her acquaintance said, ought to be better looking than it was, assuming an expression than which her ally thought he had never seen any that became it less. Was it the case, as Toby always told her, that Catherine had a slight cast in her left eye?

The night into which Mr. Tancred and his amazing young person stepped out of the Dower House seemed at first even darker than it was, by contrast. Moon there was none; but when eyes grew used to the windless gloom, stars in plenty showed through the light fog that had gathered.

Had it not been for the ominous last words{97} that had passed between Miss Aylmer and himself, Edward would have begun at once, and naturally, to question his companion as to how she had fared in the Dower House schoolroom. But a species of dread as to what he might hear made him avoid the subject. Instead—partly for something to say, and partly because the nightly heavens had always a fascination for himself—he directed her attention to some of the constellations, making a trifling comment upon their beauty. She assented in tones of heartfelt admiration, without, as he somehow was aware, lifting her head to glance at them, her attention being indeed chiefly occupied in guiding her steps through the darkness, having again refused his aiding hand or arm. This was more from habit and prudence than from any very active alarm, but though he might be, and apparently was, an anomally, it was as well not to tempt Providence. Although in point of fact her misgivings about the success of her late visit were even graver and better founded than his, she, unlike him, did not shirk the subject, but opened the campaign gallantly, in her usual spirit of strict veracity.

“What a charming girl Miss Aylmer is!” The remark was dictated by the fact that Bonnybell’s quick eye had detected the intimate-looking aside that had passed between her escort and the daughter of the house, and drawn from it conclusions of a dimension which would have startled both.

He said this, because it was a tribute due to loyalty, and because he knew that it was his real opinion, but at the moment he did not feel it.

“It was not so much what he said”—since the young gentleman in question had never opened his mouth except to admit jam, this was strictly true—“as his looks; such a nice, frank, straightforward English boy.” Men are jealous and grudging about other men’s praises, and it is more than likely that this encomium would never be repeated to its object; but, on the other hand, it might, and the attempt cost nothing.

“And you found plenty to talk about to them all?” returned he, going circuitously round his own alarm, and thinking that he might as well know the worst. He could not see her face, but he heard a slight hesitating catch in her breath.

“The governess—Miss Barnacre, is she?—monopolized the conversation a good deal; she talked very brilliantly, but I was not quite up in the subjects she mentioned. I think”—very tentatively—“that I was a little afraid of her.”

“A little?” repeated he, with much emphasis{99} and less of doubtful suggestion than was generally the case in his utterances.

“Oh, you are afraid of her too, then!” cried Bonnybell, with an accent of joyful relief, but added, reverting cautiously to her rule of uttering no opinion about her new acquaintances that might not handsomely be repeated to its objects, “Of course, I saw what a treasure she must be to Mrs. Aylmer.”

Tact told her that her praise of the detestable Barnacre had reached—perhaps a little exceeded—the limits of his power of swallowing, and she desisted gladly.

“And the girls, Catherine and Meg, had not they a chance of getting a word in?”

“Not very much”—rather slowly, as her thoughts reverted not quite comfortably to the sudden door shut upon her budding friendship with the younger Miss Aylmer. “I saw most, perhaps, of Meg. What a darling she is!”

“She is a good child, but she is a great baby for her age,” replied he, in a tone which she heard to be touched with surprise. “I should not have thought”—reviewing in his mind certain choice flowers of his present companion’s speech—“that you and she would have much in common.”

“A great baby for her age!” repeated Miss Ransome, in a key of relieved enlightenment. “Ah, that accounts for it, then.”

“For the surprise she showed—the ignorance of such very ordinary things—things that everybody knows.”

But Miss Ransome was all at once on her guard. It might be one’s misfortune to be shown up; but to show one’s self up was a sin against common sense not to be committed by any one even moderately wide-awake.

“I cannot recollect any particular instance,” she answered with apparent carelessness; “it was only a general impression, and I dare say quite a wrong one; but, anyhow”—returning to safe ground—“they are all darlings, and you are very lucky to have them so near. I do not say anything about their luck!” she added in a witching lower key.

All the same, she was relieved that, when the small family was reseated round the supper-table, spread with enticing cold foods, in Sunday leniency to the admirably treated and very much underworked servants, Camilla put her through no catechism as to her afternoon’s experiences. The note of alarm in Edward’s voice had made Miss Ransome resolve to be wholly reticent as to the slight contretemps about stupid Meg; and beyond a message sent by Mrs. Aylmer to his wife and faithfully delivered by Edward, to the effect that a day’s shopping in London would prevent her fulfilling a promise to visit Mrs. Tancred on the morrow afternoon, the Dower House remained for some good while unmentioned.

To Bonnybell it would have been an unmixed{101} blessing that this silence should last through the evening. To pick Camilla’s brains upon any subject would require the courage and dexterity of a lion-tamer, and by a series of delicate feelers, veiled suggestions, and innocent-looking suppositions on the dusky homeward walk, Bonnybell had wiled out of Edward all the information about the Aylmer family that it was really of any consequence to her to know, viz. that through the bequest of a distant kinsman the suave Toby was independent, and at the death of a decrepit great-uncle would be more independent still of his father. She had also learnt that he was called a woman-hater; but, so far from being daunted by this information she, put her own encouraging gloss upon it. “A woman-hater! Pooh! that only means that he is bored with respectable women; and though I am respectable, and mean to remain so, I am not sure that I look it.”

In this soothed and hopeful mood Miss Bonnybell sat down to supper. Not for long, however, did she remain quietly seated. Since from the Sunday supper servants were banished, and that on Edward devolved the whole onus of handing chaudfroids and pouring claret, an instant desire to help him sent her circling round the table too. He had rather that she did not. It gave him the same sense of superannuation as if she had offered to help him into his greatcoat, but after one gentle protest he desisted, fearing to hurt her feelings. Camilla’s sarcastic-sounding observation that, decrepit as Edward looked, he was capable of waiting upon two people, had its{102} sting taken out by the lenient smile that accompanied it, and that seemed almost to approve of the eager rejoinder—

“Oh, but I love waiting upon people!” There was no denying that this praiseworthy ejaculation was uttered chiefly because its author hoped that it might advance her in the good graces of her benefactress, but it was also accidentally and incidentally true. Bonnybell was one of those born obliging and serviable; and her terrible education had at least had the merit of developing these qualities in her. She added humbly, “But if it fidgets you—either of you—to see me capering round, please say so, and I will try to sit still and be waited on.”

Edward smiled slightly too, a sudden senseless warmth, for which he at once chid himself, about his heart at these signs that his womenkind were beginning to “get on.”

She broke off, looking down; and Camilla’s conscience—always too painfully active for her own or her surroundings’ comfort—gave her a smart stab.

The poor child was—thanks to her, Camilla’s, severity—afraid to mention her own mother. She made her amends at once; but even the suavity of Camilla was gruff, and her “It is a fault on the right side, but to night I think I had rather you would keep quiet!” though received with the{103} pretty gratitude of one led by rosy chains into the way she had been seeking provoked in the young stranger’s mind the inward comment, “What a surly old camel it is! I always heard that they were odious-tempered animals.” But her meek face gave no slightest indication of this reflection; and she sat down docilely, nor made any further protest against the host’s ministrations, beyond an occasional glance of deprecating gratitude when he offered her anything particularly appetizing, followed by a furtive peep at Mrs. Tancred, to ensure her not having noticed and thought too affectionate this proof of thankfulness.

The evening was halfway towards bedtime, and Bonnybell, lulled in a false security, was capering down the long morning-room with biscuit held aloft, in tantalizing education of Jock, pleased and pleasing, when the topic she had been dreading broke upon her ear.

The slender whiteness of the raised arm dropped to its owner’s side, and with a surprised and dishonest grab Jock mastered a practically “unearned increment.”

“Yes,” rather falteringly, “Mr. Tancred thought that a little exercise would do me good.”

“You will have to wear stronger shoes than the ridiculous things you went to church{104} in, if you mean to indulge in that pleasure here.”

“Oh, of course”—with an eager snatch at the subject of shoe-leather, in the hope of thereby averting further inquiries as to her visit. “Perhaps you will very kindly give me the address of a good boot-maker.”

The elder woman looked at her with a something of incredulity at such an excess of acquiescence, and Bonnybell made an inward note that though she must always agree with Camilla, it was a mistake to do it too suddenly. That defeated its own end, as the mechanical unanimity of the laugh of supers on the stage destroys all impression of mirth.

“I hope that my friends made a pleasant impression upon you?” Camilla would not be put off by any boots, thick or thin, from her intended aim; and her strong eyes demanded truth even more than did her lips. It was the one commodity of which poor Miss Ransome’s warehouse was almost always empty, but she was able to scrape up quite a respectable amount of it for her answer.

“I thought them all delightful—perfectly delightful! There was only one”—with a diffident hesitation—“that I was not quite sure I liked.”

“I—I have no doubt that I am wrong, but I did not much fancy Miss Barnacre.”

“And do you always expect to fall in love with all humanity at first sight?{105}”

There was no great severity in this mode of acceptance of her feeler, and Bonnybell rejoicingly told herself that for once she was on the right tack.

Camilla’s always rigid features grew rigider; and Bonnybell’s happy conviction of the right tack slid from under her.

“I have no opinion of tales told out of school,” answered Mrs. Tancred, coldly.

“Oh, but you must let me explain,” cried Bonnybell, in a key of anguished exegesis. “I have expressed myself so badly, as I always do. If you do not let me tell you what she really said, you will think it is much worse than it was.”

As Camilla maintained a disapproving silence, the young girl, too late conscious of a new blunder, threw a shipwrecked glance at Edward, and verifying that he looked thoroughly uncomfortable, made the lightning-quick shrewd reflection, “He wants to stick up for me, but he thinks it will make it worse for me if he does.”

“I have no doubt that she meant well, and, of course, she is a most valuable person; but I thought it impertinent in—in—a girl of her age to say that she meant to ‘tackle’ you about—about—your religious opinions.”

The austerity of Camilla’s face thawed a little, and something that might do duty for a smile turned upwards the corners of her thin-lined mouth.{106}

“Did Miss Barnacre happen to mention the day and hour at which her investigations are to take place, so that I may not be found unprepared?”

CHAPTER X

“Far from the sun and summer shade”—far, that is to say, from the distractions and liability to intrusion of the more public parts of the house, lay a gallery; and off that gallery lay a room which had witnessed the evolution of Camilla. It was to witness the evolution of Bonnybell.

“In my old schoolroom you will be quite safe from interruption,” Mrs. Tancred had said, when first breaking to her future pupil her intention of repairing the yawning gaps in that pupil’s education. It was on the Monday morning, and there had been very little “breaking” about the—to the ears that received it—horrible and staggering announcement.

“Yes, only seventeen.” She would be eighteen in three days, but did not think it necessary to add this superfluous admission. And, as she reflected afterwards, it would not have saved her.

“So that, if taken in hand at once, you will be able in some degree to make up for the time you have so grievously lost.”

Miss Ransome had been boredly speculating as to how she was to get through the day with Edward away in the City; and Toby so near and yet so far at the Dower House, but it seemed that the solving of the problem was to be done for her.

“Yes, I know it is.” The speaker had not the faintest notion of the sense of the adjective employed, but as applied to her own accomplishment, it evidently connoted something bad, so that it was safe to acquiesce.

“It is carrying your principle a little far to spell the carriage I sent to meet you ‘b-r-o-o-m.’”

“It must have been a slip of the pen,” replied Bonnybell, devoutly praying that she might not be asked how the word that had played her this scurvy trick really spelt itself.

“It will be safer to guard against the possibility of such slips in the future,” rejoined Camilla, with a resolute dryness, which showed how little she believed in her future disciple’s gloss.

The disciple made another feeble struggle against the meshes of the net which she felt to be closing round her.

“Do you think that it is any use to teach people spelling? Isn’t it born with them? I have heard it said that there are people who can never learn to spell; perhaps I am one of them.{109}”

“It is, at all events, worth a trial,” replied Mrs. Tancred, with a determination which brooked no further attempt to overset it.

Half an hour later saw Bonnybell established in solitary confinement in her prison, with the instruments of her torture methodically arrayed around her. During that baleful half hour she had, in answer to questions, revealed a knowledge of history and geography quite on a par with her orthography, since she had married Richard II. of England to his grandmother Philippa; had treated Argentina as a town, and generously given it a seat on the Italian sea-board.

When the depths of her hitherto unsunned ignorance had been satisfactorily plumbed, Mrs. Tancred left her, having pencil-marked the limit to which her investigation of each volume must extend, having opened an atlas and hinted at sums. (“Oh, but I am very good at figures! I could always calculate the odds in all the races!” was an unconsidered interpolation which did her no good.) With a detestable promise to return in an hour and a half’s time to give her a lesson in dictation, with a view to fettering the freedom of her spelling, and the observation “Your ignorance is incredible; but at seventeen nothing is irremediable,” her instructress withdrew.

Bonnybell remained for a few moments sedulously staring at the first words of the opening chapter of Green’s “History of the English People;” as who knew to what treachery of sudden return and inexcusable espionage she might be liable? Not even the sound of the{110} swing-door at the end of the passage closing behind Camilla’s departing form, nor the perfect silence that settled down upon her practically uninhabited wing, reassured Miss Ransome.

She peeped cautiously out, and finding the coast clear, at once deserted her studies in order to ascertain on what the range of windows that lighted the gallery upon which her torture-chamber opened, looked out? They gave upon a court-yard, surrounded by offices, and in which, at the moment of her survey, nothing livelier was happening than the crossing it by a footman in shirt-sleeves. Her own prospect—that from the schoolroom itself—was even more hopeless. Two tall sash-windows looked right into an impenetrable belt of thick evergreen trees and shrubs, which entirely baffled all attempts to penetrate it. To the girl’s angry fancy it seemed as if the old witch who had laid this tedious spell upon her, must have made it spring up in the night in its choking density. She turned her attention to the interior of the room, and beguiled some half-hour in examining and inwardly ridiculing its appointments and adornments—the aniline-dyed carpet, the crinolined and whiskered hideousities in the shape of photographs, presumably of Camilla’s parents, since they were male and female, and a portrait of Camilla, herself in a sashed frock and frilled trousers, with a hoop in one hand, artistically balanced by a hoop-stick in the other. The likeness was still a staring one: large bald forehead, long upper lip, and piercing eyes, already in evidence. “Put her into a sash and frilled{111} trousers, and she would not look much different now! When I get to know Edward a good deal better I shall suggest it to him!”

She laughed out loud, excessively tickled by the idea of this humane and feasible project, then pulled herself together in alarm. Who knew how far her voice might carry in the echoing void of this desolate region? nor what spies might be set to check and report her movements? Candour compelled her to reject the latter supposition as soon as formed, divining and acknowledging the absolute straightness—stupid, contemptible, and unaccountable as it was—of her tyrant.

After having exhausted the objects of interest and mirth afforded her by the—to Camilla—sacred relics of her severe infancy and adolescence, and having learnt from a perfectly accurate bald-faced clock, upon which she fastened an imaginary likeness to its owner, that she had succeeded in frittering three-quarters of an hour out of the hour and a half allotted to her in which to prepare for Mrs. Tancred’s re-appearance and the threatened dictation lesson, she returned most reluctantly to Greene, skimming and peeping and skipping, in the style of the true-born dunce, in search of what she would call “plums.” Her acquaintance with history was indeed slender; but she had a sort of idea that in the driest of that species of literature might be found oases in the shape of anecdotes about king’s mistresses, etc. Her quest in this case was very poorly rewarded, and with a heartfelt sigh she returned to Chapter I. “Angles, Saxons, Jutes! What tommy rot!{112} Jutes! What a ridiculous name! Jute! That is the cheap stuff to cover chairs with, whose colour always flies.”

Her eye left the page, and fixed itself absently upon that branch of the nearest of the shrubbery trees, which absolutely swept the window. To think of her, Bonnybell Ransome, of all people, sitting here like a good little schoolchild learning lessons! She, with her experiences in the past! Memory went back to them; indeed, they were never very far away. To do her justice, the reminiscences, begun with a scornful smile of superiority, ended by sending a slight shudder over her. That evening when they automobiled down from Paris to dine at the Réservoir at Versailles, that was about the nearest shave she ever had! Hateful, hateful old Charlie Landon! And to have to be civil to him afterwards! It would never have done to tell poor Claire. She had plenty of other things to worry her, and latterly it was so difficult to make her understand anything. But how angry even she would have been! Well, assommant épatant as it was here, it was at all events better than that.

Good Heavens! she could not have been thinking of Charlie Landon and the park at Versailles for three-quarters of an hour; yet some one—Camilla, of course—was nearing the door, and she had not yet mastered even those wretched elementary Jutes! But it was not Camilla.

Camilla was frying other fish, and, for the morning at least, Miss Ransome was saved from{113} any exposure of her frittered opportunities. Perhaps, however, she would be glad to compound for such an exposure in exchange for the one that was hovering over her unsuspecting head. Mrs. Tancred was sitting at her large and business-like writing-table, tranquilly attacking her daily task. Her correspondence was immense, and as she never left any letter or note unanswered, but sent speedy and conscientious replies, even to such valueless trivialities as most people commit at once to the waste-paper basket; as she flouted the idea of a secretary or typist, occasionally suggested by Edward, her labours sometimes threatened to overwhelm her. But the threat was never fulfilled; to-day she was going through her tale of bricks with a heart at peace. Bonnybell was out of possible mischief, with her feet set on the upward path, and in her long solitary hours of the previous day Camilla had drawn strength from communion with her own strong spirit and earnest appeal to her Unknown God worthily to bear and even profit by the heavy burden and responsibility laid upon her. Whether Miss Ransome would be flattered did she know that she was regarded in the light of a hair shirt is doubtful.

It was an understood thing that Mrs. Tancred was not to be disturbed during the forenoon, and it was a displeased face that she turned upon the butler who invaded her busy privacy.

“Mrs. Aylmer and Miss Aylmer are in the morning-room, ma’am, and wish to speak to you.”

“There must be some mistake. Mrs. Aylmer knows that I am never at home in the morning.{114}”

“Mrs. Aylmer told me to say that she wished to apologize for disturbing you, but that, as it is something very urgent, she thought you would not mind breaking through your rule for once in a way.”

Without any further remonstrance or inquiry, and no change of countenance to indicate the surprise that her friend’s audacity bred in her, Mrs. Tancred obeyed the summons to the morning-room. There she found the Aylmers, mother and eldest daughter, standing close together, and somehow giving the impression of doing it for mutual protection, near the fireplace.

“What can it be that will not keep till the afternoon?” she asked, rather severely, but holding out a hand to each in a manner that implied intimacy and goodwill.

She looked from one to the other as she put her rebuking question, and it would need a much less penetrating vision than hers to perceive that both were, in servant phrase, “very much upset.”

“I am going to London in the afternoon,” replied Mrs. Aylmer, “as I sent word by Edward last evening, but even if I was not I do not think I could have borne to put it off—to delay getting it off my mind.”

“To put what off? To getting what off your mind? Will you please come to the point?”

There was a very perceptible stiffening in Camilla’s manner; anything of the evasive or shilly-shallying being abhorrent to her. Her friend was well aware of this peculiarity, and was very much frightened by having provoked it,{115} but she was also too much frightened at the task she had in hand to state even now directly her errand.

“It is the first—the very first touch of anything disagreeable that has ever come into our relations with each other.”

“Had not we better sit down?” rejoined Camilla, with an elaborate patience. “There is no use in tiring ourselves by standing until we get to the point.”

The expectation of an immense period of waiting implied by this suggestion ought to have decided the matron addressed to take the plunge; but it did not.

“I do not think that I should ever have had the courage to tell you—to enter upon so painful a subject at all—if Catherine——” She broke off with a drowning-man look at her daughter.

Mrs. Tancred looked also at that daughter. She had never liked Catherine as much as she did Catherine’s mother, nor had ever hidden from herself that it was because of her supposed high appreciation by Edward, and because the neighbourhood’s habitual observation, “What a nice and suitable wife she would have made for him!” had penetrated, if not to her bodily ears, yet to the ears of her heart. For these very reasons, driven by her unsquarable conscience, she had always treated the girl with an unusual leniency.

“Perhaps Catherine will explain,” she said, with a strained patience, but not harshly.

Mrs. Tancred made a movement, instantly checked, of extreme irritation at being thus shuttle-cocked between two foolish battledores to the waste of time and temper.

“I will get my knitting until you have decided which of you is likely to regain your powers of speech first,” she said, moving towards her large work-basket, and drawing it within reach of her chair.

The determined endurance expressed by her knitting-needles—for she was nearing the end of her patience, and was never much of a hand at feigning—at length goaded the jibbing pair into more explicit utterance.

“We came to speak to you about the girl that Edward brought to see us yesterday.”

“Yes?” Mrs. Tancred had laid down the cardigan upon which she had just engaged, and her gimlet eyes were looking over, not through, her large spectacles in that manner which made erring kitchen-maids, drunken husbands, and even Edward himself, call on the mountains to fall on them.

“Her name is Ransome”—articulated very distinctly—“that is, her surname; her Christian name is Bonnybell, an extremely silly one, but{117} she is not responsible for it.” There was a feeling in the air as of putting armour on. “She is the daughter of that—that”—an adjective at once presentable and applicable seemed hard to find—“that very notorious Lady Ransome who died this year.”

“She is the daughter of that infamous woman! What first surprised me about her was that she seemed so intimate with Lady Tennington, who happened to be calling at the same time.”

“That is a fact which I should not have been able to verify.” Here Mrs. Tancred undoubtedly scored, strong in her immovable resolve to have no “truck” with the good-natured but completely unvirtuous Flora. Yet even this weapon might be turned against her.

Mrs. Aylmer, like her daughter, was growing rosy. There was no drop of vitriol or even gall in her whole composition, but when a stone had been thrown at her, would she be human if she did not return it?

“I was surprised that any one coming from your house, any girl under your wing, should be intimate to the degree of Christian-naming with Lady Tennington.”

“I am to understand, then, that it is on the score of her acquaintance with Lady Tennington that you have come to complain of Miss Ransome?”

The glaring inconsistency with their own practice thus coldly fastened upon them loosened still further the string of both intruders’ tongues.{118}

“What a misrepresentation!” said Catherine, in a low key of indignation; and, “Oh, dear Camilla, how you do manage to put one in the wrong when one knows that one is absolutely in the right!” cried her more emotional mother.

“I came to speak to you about the girl,” returned the other, attacking her words at a great pace, for fear they should decline to come at all, “not because I have any grudge against her—in fact, I was very much prepossessed by her appearance—but because—because—I am afraid—I really and truly think that she is not a fit companion for my children.”

“You think that because the fathers have eaten sour grapes the children’s teeth should be set on edge? Well, there is a good deal to be said in favour of your view.”

The cold impartiality aimed at, if not quite attained, in this utterance with its underlying suggestion of Pharisaism in the person addressed, called forth a hurried retort.

“You are quite mistaken; I am not blaming her for her unfortunate origin. It would be iniquitous to do that, but for her own behaviour.”

“As I told you, I knew nothing about her, but, thinking that she looked uncomfortable while Lady Tennington was talking to her, I sent her up to tea in the schoolroom. Catherine can tell you the rest.{119}”

The burden thus shifted was taken up with evident reluctance, but yet without flinching, by the daughter.

“She seemed rather shy with Miss Barnacre, who did her best to put her at ease by asking her questions about subjects she thought would interest her.” (Here a slight upward curl, like an angry tom cat’s, of the corners of Mrs. Tancred’s rigid lips, incomprehensible to her companions, would have revealed to the initiated a recalling on her part of one of the subjects, i.e. her own religious creed, of the governess’s catechism as retailed by the culprit now under discussion.) “She got up suddenly, and went over to the other side of the table, and joined Meg, who was looking at an illustrated paper.”

“Miss Barnacre and I went on talking, but I could not help catching snatches of the two girls’ conversation—of Miss Ransome’s, rather—and I can only say that it was of such a kind that I thought it best to send Meg out of the room.”

Miss Aylmer was evidently to be spared no detail of the attributed crime, nor had she indeed, now that the action was well engaged, any objection to making good her accusation.

“I heard her telling Meg apropos of a picture of some prize Schipperkes, that Lady Cressida{120} Beaulieu, who showed them, had no money of her own, but was “run” by Waddy, the indiarubber-tyre manufacturer. I thought then”—with a well-justified air of having made out her cause, “that it would be better that Meg should hear no more.”

“You were perfectly right,” said Camilla, without a moment’s hesitation, though her voice was even harsher than usual, and as she spoke she walked to the bell, and rang it.

“You are not going to send for her?” gasped Mrs. Aylmer, in a key of the most unvarnished consternation.

CHAPTER XI

Thus it was not the task-mistress, but a mere footman, whose approaching tread struck compunctious fear into the breast of the pseudo-student in the east gallery—a footman who simply requested her presence in the morning-room, coupling with his message the information that Mrs. and Miss Aylmer were there.

This ambiguous piece of news was enough to drive Jutes and Angles from a mind on which they had a firmer clutch than could be said of Miss Ransome’s. Mrs. and Miss Aylmer calling at half-past eleven in the morning! What could the infringement of what had been already impressed upon her as an iron law of Mrs. Tancred’s life portend? With a sinking heart the vision of pig-tailed Meg making her abrupt exit from the Dower House schoolroom upon an obviously vamped-up errand presented itself once more to her inward sight. Had they come to complain of her for corrupting that gaping goose’s mind?

The footman was gone, and she laughed out loud and clear. Impossible! What had she said that was not matter of common knowledge to all the world? A brighter possibility suggested itself.{122} Perhaps—Mrs. Aylmer’s manner to herself had been friendly, almost caressing—perhaps they had taken a fancy to her, had pitied her sore bondage, had come to rescue her, to propose some pleasant plan—a plan that would include Toby, or leading up to others that would include him!

“I look more young and innocent with my hair a little dishevelled,” she said, carefully pulling out a strand and letting it amble down the back of her neck.

Having smeared a drop or two of ink on the middle finger of her right hand to give the idea of past obedience to Camilla’s suggestion of taking notes as she read, Miss Ransome, having wasted only two minutes on her preparations, flew along the endless passages and down the slippery polished stairs in prompt and cheerful obedience. Short as had been the interval between her being sent for and her arrival, it had seemed phenomenal in length to the three people making forced conversation during it—conversation all the harder for being so out of character with their usual easy intimacy.

Bonnybell, on her downward flight, had quickly decided that it would be wisest to come in impulsively, and with no hint of a suspicion that the motive for her production could be other than a pleasant one. She carried her intention out admirably, and the graceful, young cordiality of her greeting to the visitors, with its respectfully grateful stage aside to Mrs. Tancred, “How good of you to let me know!” could not be{123} improved upon. But the first touch of the visitors’ limp hands, the first glance at their overset countenances, told her that her earliest and worst supposition was the true one, and that the object of their coming was not to invite her to gambols with Toby, but to arraign her for some crime against their stupid and unintelligible code. The accusing forms of Waddy and Cressida rose before her, and she said to herself with an inward groan, “What an ass I was to cast my pearls before such swine!”

Meanwhile the “swine” might provoke pity in their worst enemy; and Camilla allowed a moment or two to elapse, perhaps with a touch of malice, perhaps only while gathering herself to strike, before she relieved them from their cruelly false position.

“I do not think you need be so very glad to see Mrs. Aylmer,” she said with a dryness in comparison of which the desert sand was juicy. “She has come upon an errand that is not particularly pleasant for either herself or you.”

The light died out of Miss Ransome’s face; she was careful that it should do so gradually, to keep up the impression of complete unsuspiciousness. With the little escaped tendril of hair straying over her white nuque, and her immense and gentle eyes widely opened, she looked like a child whom some ruffian had with unexplained brutality hit and hurt. (“I am sure that I cannot be looking a day over fifteen.”) She made no protest, deciding to be too stunned for{124} that, but only turned from one to another in innocent astonished alarm.

“Mrs. Aylmer has come to lay a very grave charge against you,” continued Camilla, in an awful voice. “She will explain to you.”

There was nothing in the world that Mrs. Aylmer at the present moment relished less than the task thus imposed upon her. In her angriest moments she had never contemplated having to bring the accusation with this horrible publicity against the poor child herself. “She looks such a mere child! not a day more than fifteen!” A quiet remonstrance with Camilla upon the subject had been all she had bargained for; and now to be suddenly summoned to stick a knife into this pretty, fragile, motherless creature who had run up to her with such a sweet sureness of welcome, such pretty open pleasure,—this poor little waif whom she felt so much more inclined to take into her warm motherly arms! No, it was more than human nature could stand.

“It was Catherine who heard. Catherine knows better than I; she will tell you,” was all that Catherine’s mother was able to produce.

Miss Aylmer, to do her justice, had no zest for the deputed duty, but as she had in the first instance been less attracted than her parent by the young sinner, so was it less impossible to her to be “faithful” in the discharge of the unpleasant feat they had come expressly to perform.

The great eyes opened wider in a helpless lack{125} of comprehension, and there was an air of painful puzzledom about the delicate brows knit in the effort to recall any utterance that could have given offence.

Happen what might, she would not make it easier for this squinting prude, who had given her away. It was in these harsh terms that her own distress of mind made her qualify the very nearly invisible cast in Miss Aylmer’s left eye.

“You were telling her things that I thought—that I knew—my mother would think she had better not hear.”

“I am very, very sorry!”—in a low key of meek apology that was yet completely at sea as to the ground of that apology. “But what sort of things?”

“You told her that Lady Cressida Beaulieu was ‘run’ by a man of the name of Waddy.”

The colour died out of Bonnybell’s cheek, a feat which not even she would have been able to perform, but which a very real dismay executed for her. Good-bye, Toby! Good-bye, probably the very roof that now covered her! Here lies would avail her nothing. Here innocence, penitence, and brass must go hand-in-hand; and it was too likely that not even that trio would be strong enough to drag her out of the swamp into which she had fallen neck-deep.

“But he does!” she answered, her startled-fawn air and her apparent fifteen years giving a piquancy, if any of her present hearers were in a condition to appreciate it, to her scandalous words.{126} “I thought that everybody knew it. Why, people always ask them to their houses together; quite good people do.”

There was a horrid silence, broken at first only by Miss Aylmer’s long breath of relief at the accomplishment of a hateful duty, and its immediately following justification. To the eye of faith, Camilla might have been almost seen lifting her bludgeon. It fell.

“Because a blatant indecency is nowadays the key-note of a certain section of society,” she said with an eye-flash that literally scorched its unlucky object, “there is no need for you to introduce its pollution into our midst; if you have the misfortune to possess a mind full of unsavoury knowledge, I must at least request you to keep it within the bounds of that mind.”

The young girl stood shivering with bowed head under the blast of this blizzard. She could not help shivering a little, but had still presence of mind enough to shiver even more than she could help, particularly as a restless movement and a sort of sigh coming from the direction of Mrs. Aylmer gave her a faint hope that to one at least of her accusers the punishment that had overtaken her seemed excessive in its severity.

“I was brought up a good deal abroad,” Bonnybell whispered faintly. “I am afraid that I do not yet quite understand English ways.”

“That is nonsense,” replied Camilla, very harshly, but yet not quite with the awful voice-quality of her former Philippic—“sheer nonsense.{127} The standard for the behaviour of young girls in France is a far stricter one than ours.”

“Then I can say nothing!” rejoined the poor child in a voice of despair, folding her slight hands, and really not for the moment noticing how advantageously the ink-stain on the middle finger of the right hand was introduced to notice by this gesture. But Camilla saw the tell-tale spot—tell-tale of obedience and honest effort, and it caused her an odd qualm of pity.

Probably the accusers found the situation too poignantly unpleasant for further endurance, which was also, since their work was done, needless. A murmured proposition to depart from the mother was followed by a murmured consent from the daughter. There was a little natural difficulty about their farewells, and in the moment of hanging back which resulted, and before this problem was solved by Camilla’s shaking hands with them and saying in a hard, conscientious voice, “You were perfectly right. I am glad that you had the courage to tell me. You shall have no cause for further complaint,” Bonnybell realized that before the clock had ticked thirty times she would be left alone with her judge and executioner to hear what awful sentence of hopeless doom?

With an impulse which had less of calculation in it than in any of her actions, words, or gestures, since her first entry, though even here there was a little, she slipped across the intervening space to the one person in whom she had divined some bowels of compassion, i.e. Mrs. Aylmer,{128} and spoke tremblingly, yet not without a forlorn dignity.

“I am very, very sorry for having made such a bad return for your goodness in giving me so kind a welcome; but indeed, indeed I did it in ignorance!”

“I am quite sure you did,” replied the other precipitately, conquering her desire to throw her arms round the criminal and give her several hearty kisses only by a very fast retreat to the door; “and I would have given anything that—that this had not happened!”

Mrs. Aylmer must be a foolish woman, for she cried the whole way back to the Dower House.

There remained the executioner and the gallows bird. Camilla had sat down. Judges always sit, but, on the other hand, hangmen always stand. A grotesque wonder flitted through Bonnybell’s mind as to how a person who united the two functions could harmonize this discrepancy in practice? There followed an absolute silence. Camilla did not even look at her. She sat with the “starers” she had taken off lying in her lap, absently rubbing their glasses with her pocket-handkerchief. Was her wrath too deep for even further vituperation? Would it be satisfied only by a dumb ejection from her house and protection?

As the moments passed this seemed to the girl waiting the pronouncement of her doom the only possible solution, and after a time she lifted up, if such a phrase can apply to anything so low and faint, her little pathetic voice.{129}

“Must I go to-day, or will you let me stay till to-morrow—to make arrangements?”

Camilla lifted her eyes, out of which the fire and sword had gone, but whose expression was inscrutable to the quaking would-be reader of their meaning.

The cool common sense of the inquiry brought home to Miss Ransome more strongly than ever before the sense of her own waifness. She threw out her hands hopelessly in front of her.

The action once more brought the inky ensign of her studiousness into prominence, and this time it really served as a lifebuoy. Not that Camilla said anything that spoke of relenting; but some indefinable change in the atmosphere that surrounded the rigid figure in the armchair, still rubbing its goggles, emboldened the poor sinner to put up a quivering plea in her own defence.

“I have not had many advantages; it was not poor Claire’s fault”—with a hasty recurrence of that feeling that it was against the rule of the game to impute blame to the helpless dead. “She was too ill latterly to understand about anything—but—I have not had much of a chance.”

For once—except in that pardonable gloss upon the habits of her late mother—the girl was speaking God’s truth, and so strong and immediate was the effect of her appeal that neither Mrs. Tancred nor herself perceived that she had used the tabooed Christian name.{130}

When the answer came, Bonnybell knew that neither to-day nor to-morrow would find her sur la pavé, as she herself would have worded it.

There was both dignity and kindness of a severe sort in voice and mien; and to the reprieved criminal the relief was so immense that she fell incontinently on the floor at her benefactress’s feet. Mrs. Tancred left her there, and hurried out of the room, in evident distaste for the prostration.

“That was another mistake,” she said. “Will there be no end to them? Oh, how did I live through it? Oh, what a near squeak! Oh for a cigarette!{131}”

CHAPTER XII

There was weariness in the voice that answered; but neither that quality nor the patience that accompanied and emphasized it had any influence in persuading the putter of the question to desist or delay the communication which it prefaced.

Edward had come home dispirited and out of tune. It had been a bad day on the Stock Exchange, even the gilt-edged securities tumbling down; a rumour of the suicide of a member had been confirmed, and the sense of how little he himself risked, in comparison with the life-and-death struggle going on around him, which to many minds would have been a source of consolation, deepened Mr. Tancred’s gloom. He would have been glad to have been told something pleasant, however trivial, on his return.

But Camilla was not one of those wives who tactfully pick and choose the moments for imparting bad news. It would never have occurred to her that ill tidings told at night might probably rob the recipient of sleep, and that it would{132} therefore be better to defer them till the morning. Such a reticence would have seemed to her to argue a want of moral courage on the part of both narrator and hearer. If anything untoward occurred to herself she wished to be told it at once, no matter whether she was sick or well, waking or sleeping; and she did as she would be done by.

“What has she done?” cried he, forgetting his pretence of not knowing to whom his wife was alluding, with a great heightening of his sense of out-of-tuneness, made up of fear of what he was going to hear and of exasperation with himself for minding so much what he ought to mind so little.

“Marian Aylmer and Catherine have been here to-day,” said Camilla, not falling into the procrastinating weakness which had been shown by the ladies alluded to, but going straight to the point.

“So she had in the afternoon; but they came in the morning.” She paused, as if to let him absorb this fact, pregnant with significance of something abnormal and monstrous. “They came to make a formal complaint against”—“your protégée” was on the very edge of her lips, but perhaps some sudden impression of how fagged he looked prompted her at the very last moment to alter it to—“our guest.{133}”

In his heart he knew that he was not very much surprised, recollecting the relieved tone of Bonnybell’s “That accounts for it!” in answer to his remark upon Meg Aylmer’s backwardness, on their homeward walk. He felt at the time with misgiving that it would be wiser not to ask what “it” was. Well, he was going to learn now.

“I did not know that Meg had a mind to corrupt,” he answered unwisely, and, with an instant awareness of his slip, added, “Miss Ransome must have been very quick about it, for she could not have been more than half an hour in the schoolroom, and the great and good Barnacre was there on guard all the time.”

“I only repeat the tale that was told me,” replied Camilla, with frosty impartiality. “She was overheard inoculating Meg with one of the worst of the current scandals of the day, dilating—no”—correcting herself with characteristic honesty—“there perhaps I am inexact; she probably had not time to dilate, but telling her how Lady Cressida Beaulieu was ‘run’ by a man of the name of ‘Waddy.’”

An odious inclination to vexed laughter assailed Edward: firstly at the ugly piquancy of the imputed criminal utterance as proceeding from such almost infantile lips, and secondly at the disproportion of such a pomp of disapproval as was implied by the “indignation meeting” alluded to. But the laughter impulse was a mere muscular contortion, and the annoyance killed it dead before he found words{134} to comment on the charge. The accusation was grotesque—with the criminal’s antecedents, what else could they have expected?—but the peep given by it into her mind and its furniture hurt him all the same. The whole business, with its unnecessary parade and fuss, was a storm in a tea-cup, and yet it might have far-reaching consequences for the poor little culprit, and it was he that would have brought them on her. He knew that he ought to express abhorrence at the offence committed, and that the article which issued from the warehouse of his jaded mind was not the one expected.

“It is I that am to blame,” he said, a sharp self-reproach piercing through the natural languor of his tones. “I ought not to have introduced her to them; she had no wish for it.”

“She need not fear a repetition of the experience,” returned Camilla, folding her arms in that wrapper which she had assumed, having snatched ten minutes from the bare half-hour which she dedicated to dressing for dinner, in order to make an irruption with her Evangel into her husband’s quarters.

To Edward’s eye and mind that snuff-coloured peignoir had something in common with the judge’s black cap. His wife seemed always to assume it when she pronounced sentence of death. Was she going to pronounce one now? If there was any chance of averting it, that chance would not lie in the direction of a too eager partisanship on his own part.

“You must remember,” he said with a cool{135} gentleness of reminder, “that when you undertook this task you braced yourself to the making of discoveries that would more surprise than please you.”

“That is true,” she answered after a moment’s reflection. “If you had asked me, I should have told you that I was prepared for anything—bad habits, objectionable phrases, idleness, ignorance—her ignorance is stupendous.”

“I put her through a few elementary questions upon English history this morning. There were not many facts that she was sure of, but she was quite sure that King Richard II. had married Philippa of Hainault. I tried to explain to her that in the fourteenth century men did not marry their grandmothers, although it has become a very common practice to-day.”

The shaft went home, as it was intended. What had he done to deserve it? Did she suspect him of an intention, by servile acquiescence in her subsidiary charges, to lead her away from the main point at issue?

“But that is not the question now. What we are primarily concerned with—what was the object of Mrs. Aylmer’s visit—is to prevent a person for whom we have made ourselves answerable from spreading the infection of her own corruption to healthier households.”

The husband and wife were standing opposite to each other, but in their respective grace and ungrace, still in morning dress; a trivial irritation with her for making him late for dinner{136} forming the warp of that annoyance of which her communication was the woof.

“Don’t you think that the whole thing is grossly exaggerated?” he asked with an accent where a lifelong habit of courtesy proved its value by helping him to an apparently quite good-tempered air of deference—“the pompous embassy, the inconsiderate breaking of your rules. No!”—recapitulation of his friend’s errors against good taste leavening the “sweet reasonableness” of his words with a perceptible indignation. “The whole way of setting about it was wrong, and not what I should have expected of an old friend like Mrs. Aylmer.”

“She was perfectly right,” rejoined Camilla, standing bolt upright under an electric burner, which made her look taller and scraggier than usual. “If a woman is granted the inestimable blessing of children, her first duty is to them, and besides——”

She paused. Should she tell him, as it was on the edge of her lips to do, what was the strict truth, that both the original idea of the indictment against Bonnybell and the vigour to carry it out had belonged to Catherine Aylmer and not to her mother? Should she or should she not? The neighbourhood was right. Catherine Aylmer would have made Edward a fit and congenial wife in the event of her own death, and Camilla was aware that her life was not a good one. The girl might still fill that office. Why, then, should the present tenant say anything calculated to prejudice Edward against her?{137}

Mrs. Tancred had no powers of inventing, nor wish to invent, an altered utterance.

Silence followed. He had forgotten that she was making him late for dinner. All desire to check the flow of her communication had ceased, replaced by an awful curiosity for details.

“You are mistaken there; it was only fair to her that she should be confronted with them.”

The hearer hoped that the slight shudder he could not repress at the idea of this display of equity escaped detection.

“Oh, she came bounding in, so delighted to see them. I explained to her at once that she had no great cause for elation at this visit. They must have felt rather like fools under her demonstration; they certainly looked it.” She stopped with a fierceish smile, as if the memory of her friend’s discomfiture were not at all disagreeable to her.

The picture rose in sharpest realism before Edward’s vision. The lovely little gay gladness coming frisking in, and its reception!

“She made no attempt to deny the charge.” After a moment, “Her excuse, if it can be called one, was that she had supposed every one to be acquainted with the ugly story. Perhaps every one is!” Another slight pause. “To do her{138} justice, I do not think that she had any glimmering of a suspicion that there was any difference between ‘decent’ and ‘indecent’ in conduct or conversation.”

He bit his lip; protestation or extenuation would be fatal, and he attempted neither.

“Then—why, then they went. I do not think I ever saw people in quite such a hurry to be off.”

Again her tom-cat smile reappeared, and she went off wearing it, when she at length left him to his belated toilet.

It was disingenuous of Edward to pretend ignorance of the subject of Bonnybell’s question, but though guiltily conscious of an acute curiosity as to the criminal’s version of the story, a grave doubt as to whether it would not be the wiser course to let such sleeping dogs lie, drove him into as much prevarication as was implied by his “Heard what?”

“If you have not heard, I think it would be a relief to me to tell you, if you would allow me.”

“Oh, but I have heard!” he answered rather precipitately, uncomfortably aware that he was giving himself away by admitting knowledge of what he had a moment ago feigned ignorance of.

The scene was the morning-room after dinner on the same day. From that dinner Camilla had been summoned away by a messenger of ill from{139} the village. She had left that small and rigidly plain portion of her own excellent food which she ever allowed herself without hesitation or regret, and was still absent, now that the tea-table was being placed in its usual position. Edward had not long rejoined his guest, who was sitting rather out of sight behind a screen, from beyond which her voice came low and plaintive. The few glances at her that he had allowed himself during dinner had told him—or he thought so—that her eyelids were a little reddened, though not to the extent of disfigurement. “I am one of the few people who can cry becomingly,” was her own dispassionate dictum, “and it will be disarming to look as if I had wept, and I am sure”—the waif feeling returning in some strength—“it will come easily enough; no one can ever have had better reason to do it.”

“I, too, quite thought so,” he answered mournfully, touched by the gentle humility of her confession of mistake.

“I dare say I should have continued in my fool’s paradise if Miss Aylmer had not persuaded her mother to come and complain of me.”

Bonnybell had not the generosity of Camilla, and the immediate effect of her words upon Miss Aylmer’s ally and supposed admirer filled her with a sincere and tranquil joy.

“Miss Aylmer!” he echoed with an unmistakable start. “Catherine Aylmer! Oh, you surely must be mistaken.{140}”

For answer, he saw a lovely little dusky head shaking itself sadly from its seclusion.

“She was perfectly right—oh, do not think I am blaming her!—quite, quite right, if she thought I was doing her sister harm; but oh, it is all such a different milieu from what I have been used to! If you knew, if you could only guess, how utterly at sea I feel among you all.”

There was something in the forlorn and well-justified pathos in her tone that might have melted a harder heart, and affected a nature less sensitive to others’ sufferings than Edward’s. He rose out of the armchair into which he had tiredly let himself down on his first entrance, as if seeking relief from his emotion in a change of posture. (“Good Heavens!” thought she, “I have overdone it. I have been too affecting. I thought I was safe with him. One is never safe.”) But he only went and stood on the hearth-rug, with his back to the garlands and grouped figures of the Adams chimney-piece, and took a coat-tail pensively under each arm.

“I am afraid that it was inevitable at first,” he said at length with a faltering reassurance in his voice. “The plunge was too sudden; but things will right themselves in time, don’t you think?”

His manner was always tentative, and he had never in his life felt less sure of the truth of any proposition than of the one he was now advancing.

“Do you really think so?” she asked, once more relieved and astonished that her new fears of his harbouring purposes of enterprise were as{141} baseless as her former ones. She added hesitatingly. “You could help me a good deal if you would.”

“If—when you saw that I was going to make one of my blunders, you would make some sign to me to stop.”

His head was bent a little. It gave her the opportunity to notice how thickly and with what a pretty tendency to curl at the ends his hair clothed its crown. Her proposition had not the effect of lifting it.

“I do not quite see how that can be managed,” he answered in a key whose reluctance to disappoint her and an indubitable disapproval of her project strove for mastery.

“We could agree beforehand upon a little code of signals,” she went on, pushing aside the screen that had hitherto partly hidden her in the eagerness of persuasion. “If you passed your hand across your forehead, it would mean ‘Stop at once.’ If you pulled out your shirtcuff, it would mean ‘Make your sentence end in some different way from what you are going to.’”

Still his eyes did not lift themselves, nor did he give any sign of acquiescence. An uncomfortable sense of the horrible glibness—speaking of long use of such methods—with which she developed her little underhand plan was very present to him.

“Don’t you?” she answered humbly and sadly. “Then I am sure it is not a good one, but{142} if you do not consent to help me in some way—to give me some sort of rule to guide me—I shall always be getting into fresh disgrace with Mrs. Tancred; and—old people are so very easily shocked.”

He lifted the head whose well-furnished top she had been admiring now, and looked at her with a disapproval which, if gentle, was very unmistakable.

“I think, if you do not mind, that I had rather you did not speak of my wife quite like that.”

Her heart sank, and the flustered desire to repair her error led her into a far graver one.

“Now I have made an enemy of you too,” she said, “and Heaven knows that is the last thing I wish to do; but—but she looked so much more like your mother.”

CHAPTER XIII

Of the three denizens of Stillington its owner took by far the easiest mind to bed with her. She had accepted the presence of Bonnybell, with all its attendant ills, in the same spirit as she would have accepted the loss of her fortune, an infidelity of Edward’s, or some dire blain or boil upon her own body. Bonnybell had been sent here by the same Unerring Wisdom that would have sent her any of the other possible afflictions, and she had only to adjust her back to the burden.

Miss Ransome had no such consciousness to support her as, with an inexpressible yearning for the soothing properties of tobacco, she sat in the huge chintz chair by her bedroom fire, taking stock of her errors, and their probable consequences.

“I shall bring him round in time, I suppose,” she reflected. “But what a surprise! Who would have thought he would have taken up the cudgels for his old lady’s juvenility so violently? Violent is not the word. I should not think he could ever be violent; and yet those lackadaisical eyes gave a fine flash when I suggested that she was{144} not quite a slip of a girl! I must pretend for the future that she looks sixteen, or”—more shrewdly—“I had better not meddle with the subject again at all to him.” A lugubrious stare into the fire, with inky hair still unbuilt for the night, and hands clasped round slender lace-and-satin-clad knees. (Bonnybell’s peignoir would not own Camilla’s, even as a poor relation.) “After all, I believe the old camel will prove the easier of the two to get round. I did not half dislike her when she stood glowering over me as I grovelled on the floor, and told me I should have a chance—it will be an uncommonly disagreeable chance”—with a backward glance thrown by memory at her hours of evaded study in the dull schoolroom, ending in the grisly ordeal of confrontation with her accusers—“but such as it is, I must hold on to it until something better turns up.”

When will that be? Not, certainly, on the morrow of her exposure; that brought only a dictation lesson, which threw Röntgen rays of unexampled brutality upon her orthography; brought also a bluntly worded inquiry from Camilla, in allusion to a slight tinting which her late paling experiences had made seem admissible, as to whether she had “forgotten to wash her face?” A still less delicately worded hope followed, in answer to Miss Ransome’s explanation that the wind must have caught her cheeks, a caustic hope that the “zephyr” in question might remain prisoned in its cave during her stay in her present quarters. A further piece of advice to commit it to the flames with the least possible{145} delay displayed the discourtesy of an entire disbelief in Miss Ransome’s interpretation of her heightened roses.

The charge and its feeble parry took place in Edward’s presence; but he did not attempt the smallest share in the engagement. Not a rustle of the paper he was reading; not the least fidgeting on his chair, not an eye-glance nor a lip-biting gave evidence of any inward protest against the “baiting” that was being undergone by one whom he had yesterday seemed inclined to shield and pity. Throughout the day—or rather throughout that small part of it when he was at home and in her presence—he treated her with a perfect but distant courtesy, and so through the next and the next.

“Oh, how careful one ought to be!” she sighed to herself ruefully. “One would have thought that the one perfectly safe thing to do was to laugh at a wife to a husband, or at a husband to a wife, but in this dreadful place there are no rules, only exceptions!”

When the third day showed no sign of a relaxation of her host’s gentle austerity, Miss Ransome grew desperate. She was returning in drag-footed boredom from a walk in the shrubberies to the extreme end of which she had been lured by the distant sound of guns. It was unlikely that the park should be shot in its master’s absence; but triggers were being pulled somewhere within hearing, and one of them might be by Toby! It was on neutral ground alone that she could now have a chance of pursuing that{146} chase which she was so loth to abandon. It was possible that if she walked far enough into the park in the direction of the Dower House, she might intercept him on his homeward way. Her intention to make the attempt held out while she followed a long walk that wound with the slow midland rivulet, that it was long ago cut to accompany on its sluggish course through the pleasure-grounds, until a little bridge across the stream, and a rustic gate on its further side giving access to a copse that led into the Park, were reached. But, having attained this point, her resolution failed. The light was thickening. Some one had told her that this was the season when the stags—heard even from here belling loudly—were dangerous to meet. Even the very off-chance of being rescued by Toby from hoofs and antlers made it scarcely worth while to incur the probability of being tossed by the one and trampled by the other. She turned sadly away, wafting a sigh in the direction of the renounced prize, and breathing the silent, pensive ejaculation, “Oh, you great lout, if you only knew what was good for you!”

She retraced her steps through the humid gloom of the laurels, and by the dimming, dull water. Near the house—but not very near—just where two giant cedars stood on each side of the path, making twilight into midnight beneath their shade, she met Edward.

“You thought I was lost!” cried her little voice in trepidating pleasure. “You came to look for me! How more than kind!{147}”

“I am afraid that I did not even know you were out,” he answered, stepping hastily out of the patch of darkness and throwing away the end—or a good deal more than the end—of his cigarette. Both actions seemed to her unnecessary and undesirable. She commented only upon the last.

“Please don’t!” she pleaded eagerly. “You know that I was brought up upon cigarettes—I mean, of course, upon their smell. You do not know how I love it!”

The Heimweh in her tone shocked and startled him. Heimweh! Good Heavens, for what a Heim!

“Do not walk quite so fast,” she said, entreatingly. “I want, if you will let me, to get right with you. I know that I have been all wrong since Sunday.”

He slackened his pace—as what else could he do, so besought?—but it was with an unwillingness that she divined through his civil acquiescence; and he did not answer quite immediately. To deny that she had been “wrong with him” since Sunday would be to take a leaf out of that Liar’s Book, of which he had already begun to be afraid that she was a steady peruser; to assent would be certain to be followed by a re-opening of the casus belli, and there was nothing in the world that he wished less. To refuse to listen to the explanation, which it was but too evident that she had invented and was bent on uttering, would be to give it importance. He tried to carry the thing off lightly.{148}

“My memory refuses to go back as far as Sunday. This is Thursday. Let us start a new reckoning from to-day.”

But Bonnybell was not to be put off. She got a little nearer to him, partly in real anxiety, partly because she reckoned upon her face as her best ally in the work of propitiation, and in this scant light proximity was indispensable for him to feel its value.

“You were quite under a misapprehension the other night, when you were so displeased with me,” she began, with rapid deprecation. “Is it likely that, friendless as I am, I should want to alienate my best—a—a—well-wisher?” (She had hesitated over the last word, as if her humility had replaced by it the more presuming “friend.”) “I never meant to say or imply that Mrs. Tancred was really old.” (Oh, Miss Ransome!) “Fifty! what is fifty nowadays? Many women of fifty do not look a day over five-and-thirty. With a little touching up, Mrs. Tancred would not look a day over thirty.”

He would give his ears to stop her. There seemed to him something at once shocking and ludicrous, firstly in her brazen mendacity, and secondly in the indelicacy of her determination to discuss his wife; but she ran on so fast in the eagerness of self-exculpation that he could not find a chink in which to put a protest.

“What I meant to say was that Mrs. Tancred intended to look old, that it was a parti-pris in her case. I thought it must be so by the way she scratches her hair off her forehead.{149}”

But here, chink or no chink, he broke in. “Stop!” he said, authoritatively, “I must beg of you to change the subject.”

Through the damp mistiness she looked up at him, snubbed and frightened, her pomegranate-flower lips apart, and with the stream of explanatory eloquence that had been issuing from them frozen at its source.

“I see that I am making bad worse,” she said presently, her glibness fled, and in a very crestfallen little pipe.

He could not command himself to speak again yet; still sorely angry and chafed, yet with a half-relenting feeling that he had been too harsh to this wicked little waif that had been tossed on his shore.

“I am a very great trial to you both,” presently came sighingly in his direction—sighingly, and he half-suspected showerily too; “but it is far worse for Mrs. Tancred than for you.”

“Worse for Mrs. Tancred than for me!” repeated he, echoing her words in a tone of alarm.

Was she going to be guilty of some new monstrosity against good taste? Was she going to force him to a fresh rebuke? This latter was perhaps the most urgent form that his fear took. But her next words reassured him.

“Yes, because she has to see so much more of me than you have. You are away all day, and need never cast a thought towards me between sunrise and sunset, but I am always before her eyes, shocking her every time that I open my{150} mouth by my gross ignorance, or by saying something impossible without knowing it; and now that she has undertaken my education——”

She paused dramatically. A wholesome and welcome inclination to laugh came over him, but he checked it; he must not allow himself to decline into triviality, or she might at once resume her terrible confidentialness.

“It is not that I am not most anxious to learn. Oh, do not misunderstand me on that point! I have had enough of misunderstandings the last three dreadful days.”

Through the dusk he could see that her little black orphaned hands were tightly clasping each other, but he did not know that their anxious grip was a matter of calculation, nor that the penitent before him was saying to herself, “I am really very touching. The odd thing is that I am rather touched myself too.”

“If I thought I should ever do her any credit,” she continued, inserting a slight quaver into her tone; “but I have no natural aptitude for learning, and I am beginning so late. I cannot bear to think of what uphill work it will be for her.”

“That is an aspect of the question that will never present itself to her,” replied he, with what might be a shade of dryness in his voice; and the anxious Bonnybell divined that she was not even yet quite on the right tack.

(“I am overdoing it; I must not be too angelic. He is beginning to suspect that I embroider a little.{151}”)

“Perhaps it was one word for Mrs. Tancred and two for myself”—allowing a tinge of self-rallying playfulness to creep into her words. “Perhaps I am only a born dunce, and want an excuse for remaining one.”

The unvarnished truth of her last sentence did her far more service with her hearer, as she in a moment felt, than the high varnish of her preceding ones.

“There are worse things in life than a dunce,” he answered, in a tone of unmistakable indulgence, and for which he contemned himself.

“Then we are friends again,” rejoined she, softly sliding out, with carefully studied impulsiveness, four little humble fingers and a hesitating thumb to meet his clasp.

“Yes,” he answered, accepting her hand with a frank comradeship, in which even her expert palm could detect no attempt at a squeeze, “by all means let us be friends; only”—with a return to his habitually tentative, non-assertive manner—“would not it be a good plan for us to remember that even in the most intimate friendships there are reticences?”

Miss Ransome’s education proceeded, despite all her struggles, with inexorable regularity. “Apace” is hardly the word to apply to its progress, since her own resolution to learn as little as possible rescued her from all danger of its course being a rapid one. It was impossible to peruse a contraband novel from across the Channel, or enjoy a ribald little Parisian journal, smuggled to{152} her by a foreign admirer, during the whole time of her incarceration in the schoolroom, as detection must inevitably have followed upon an entire neglect of the imposed tasks. But her intelligence was quick, and she was able to assimilate enough surface knowledge of the subjects in which she would have to undergo an examination by her tormentor without absolute disgrace, and yet have a good margin of time to bestow upon “L’Enigme du Péché” and Le Petit Journal.

A discovery that her reading of her native tongue was on a par with, if not upon an even lower plane of accomplishment than her spelling, led to the imposition of a corvée more hated by its victim, as less able to be shirked or scamped than any of its fellows. In an evil hour, it occurred to Camilla that to make her pupil read aloud the daily newspapers to herself would be the best method by which at once to discover and correct the extent of her ignorance. Through foreign intelligences, leaders, money-markets the unhappy girl ploughed with stumbles and jibs. Once a gleam of possible relief came to her.

“I could explain it a little to you, if you cared to hear”—with a delicate bashfulness at this proposal to reverse their respective relations and turn instructor.

“I know nothing in the world that I wish less! Read the review of the new ‘Life of Schopenhauer.’”

But if Miss Ransome was an unsuccessful and unwilling pupil, she was, as Jock soon learnt to his cost, a relentless and successful teacher. He disliked being educated almost as much as she did herself—it would be impossible to do so more—yet that perseverance on her part which, if exerted in another direction, would have made her a profound and eloquent scholar, and his own vanity, of which he had as large a share as most dogs—and that is saying a good deal—combined to enable him to reach a very high standard of unnatural accomplishments.

“If I ever get round her, it will be viâ Jock!” Bonnybell said to herself astutely, seeing the unwilling laughter that wrinkled the mouth of Jock’s mistress, and hearing the latent enjoyment that pierced through the superficial snub of her words.

“He may not enjoy being educated, but, like me, he knows that it is good for him,” replied Bonnybell, with pretty insincerity, throwing a glance, as she delivered herself of her fib, at Edward, to see how he took it—whether with approbation of her sweet docility, or with that grain of distrust which she had uneasily surmised several times lately in his reception of her statements both as to fact and sentiment?

She could read no expression of either approval{154} or disapproval in his eyes; but he broke out into one of his rare laughs, as she capered off again down the long room, whirling Jock along in an ambling waltz, against which his dragging hind legs made a bored protest. There was calculation and consciousness in the childish frisking gaiety of Jock’s partner; but yet there was real young enjoyment too. One might be a little Mayfair mudlark, obliged to earn one’s bread by currying favour with one’s patrons in any way that seemed most likely to succeed; but one was only eighteen, and it took but a very little to make one’s heart feel uncommonly light.

Having landed Jock in front of his mistress, and by judicious pressure upon his stomach forced him to execute an angry bow to that lady as a finale to his performances, Miss Ransome, forsaken by her good genius, lapsed into ruinous reminiscence.

“When we were at Deauville there was a poodle at the hotel who could walk as well on his forelegs, with his hind ones in the air, as on all four. My mother was so pleased with him that she wanted to buy him; but the lady to whom he belonged—she was not quite a lady; she was with the Prince de Compiègne—would not hear of parting with him. Claire could never bear not getting what she wished; so we had a scene about it one night on the stairs.”

“There is nothing for it but patience, I suppose!” said Mrs. Tancred, a little later, when{155} Bonnybell, not enjoying the atmosphere which she had created, expressed herself tired and went to bed; and Edward answered, with brief acquiescence—

CHAPTER XIV

A week had elapsed, and a morning came on which Edward set off for London accompanied by his wife, instead of, as usual, alone! The result was obvious: freedom—temporary, indeed! but still freedom for Miss Ransome. But of what use was that noblest of God’s gifts to one who had no means of employing it?

“Don’t get into mischief if you can help it,” was Camilla’s parting benediction; and the smiling humility of Bonnybell’s “I will try not,” took an ambiguous meaning as she turned it over afterwards in the leisure and liberty of her own mind. “Try not to get into mischief?” or “Try not to help getting into mischief? How can I help helping? What mischief could I get into if I tried?”

This problem set her pondering. If she were to borrow Camilla’s cutting-out scissors from her work-basket, she might cut snips in the canvases of those dismal primitifs. If she were to employ the aid of a poker, she might break the nose of the young Augustus coldly glimmering at her from his pedestal in the centre of the little circular vestibule at the stairs’ foot. But in neither{157} of these, nor in any analogous crimes, would there be much point nor any enjoyment.

In her total destitution of all opportunities for evil, the poor young creature snatched eagerly at the one sin—though it was only a paltry one of omission—open to her; the entire neglect of the tasks assigned her by her departed tyrant. It relieved her to kick the instruments of her intended elevation and enlightenment into a corner, and when “L’Enigme du Péché”—a work whose very title would make Camilla’s straight hair break into horrified curls—was produced from its hiding-place; when the little shoes lately employed in propelling Greene, Bryce, etc., were hoisted to the top of the nursery fender, which still stood in long-unneeded precaution before the generous grate, Bonnybell’s conscience grew clear. Her power of doing wrong in her present surroundings was infinitesimal, but she had done what she could. To do what one could!—this was a standard beyond which Mrs. Tancred herself did not attempt to rise. At the ingenious perversity of this reflection, Bonnybell laughed delightedly.

She had been in the enjoyment of her illicit pleasures for an hour and a half, and had begun to suspect that the solution of the “Enigma” would form a plat too highly spiced for even her seasoned palate, when the door opened. She whisked her feet down from their dizzy height and sat up, to find a salver, a note, and a footman at her elbow.

“Any answer?” she asked, taking the note and looking at its superscription curiously. The{158} handwriting was at once familiar and unfamiliar; known, but not lately known.

“The chauffeur wished to know how soon you would like the motor to come round?”

“The chauffeur? The motor?” repeated she, staring; then, bethinking herself that the best way to solve this new enigma would be the same as that which she had been employing on the other, she tore open the envelope and read—

“My darling little Bonnybell,—

(The unaccountable warmth of this opening took her eye to the signature, “Flora.”

“Of course! How stupid not to have remembered Flora Tennington’s scrawls and flourishes!”)

“I have just heard from Harrington” (so Harrington is still with Flora, is he?) “that he had seen your ugly old gaoler and her souffre douleur at the station and off to London, so I have sent the motor to fetch you to spend the day. If it comes back without you I shall go on sending it until it brings you, dead or alive. I have millions of things to say and ask.

“Your loving
“Flora.

“P.S.—You will meet two friends, a new and an old one.”

Miss Ransome’s decision must be immediate. The expectant footman was still at her elbow awaiting orders. She threw her cap over the mill.{159}

The decision—given the deep disgrace from which she had so lately emerged—sounded like madness; but a streak of reason ran through it. Her host and hostess had announced their intention of returning by a later train than the one that usually brought Edward; the servants would, in all probability, not tell upon her. Camilla’s own lifelong maid, a young lady of fifty-five, had, shortly before Bonnybell arrived, yielded to the urgencies of a bridegroom, become too pressing to be longer resisted, to crown by marriage an engagement of thirty years. Her present attendant was a young person whom she had employed because nobody else would, and in order to make her a character. But what decided Miss Ransome to take the plunge was the postscript, “You will meet two friends, a new and an old one.”

“An old friend!” This by itself would act as a deterrent. It must be a man, since Claire and she never had any women friends after Flora dropped them, and of the men who formed her circle, there was not one concerning whom her most ardent wish was never to hear of or meet him again. But “a new friend!” Who could it be but Toby?

It was, perhaps, a stretch of language to give that name to a person, the sole evidence of whose meriting it was that he looked black when she entered the room, remained churlishly silent during the few minutes of their joint occupancy of it, and left it with a bang of discourteous haste{160} to escape her. But, at all events, it was well worth trying, and in twenty minutes from her first reception of the proposition she was flying along between the tree-stems of the park, on her way to accept it.

The motor was, to her relief, a brougham. To arrive touzled and stained—and she had not a proper motoring costume with her—would be to prejudice her chance of success at the outset. She must be pretty before all things. Whether her prettiness was to be further ornamented by a sweet innocence or a daring raciness of conversation must depend upon what a further acquaintance with Toby’s tastes and methods might reveal. If he were an habitué of Flora’s, the latter of the two alternatives was the one more likely to please. But her deep-seated and universal distrust of man—falsified though it had been in the case of Edward by a fortnight’s acquaintance—made her finally resolve to temper her raciness, if she was racy, with caution.

Arrived, after a quarter of an hour’s whirl, Bonnybell found Flora in a hot room, crammed with flowers and bric-à-brac, whose very atmosphere brought back, with a rush of startled repulsion, to the girl’s memory the atmosphere that she had breathed through her own childhood and early youth. During the last period of her mother’s life it had been further improved by the continual perfume of champagne and drugs; but the present one, though free from these ingredients, was like enough to make her realize how far she had travelled from what it represented,{161} and to wish that she had not come, particularly as no vestige of a redeeming Toby showed on the naked horizon.

Flora was too much occupied at the moment of her guest’s arrival to spare time for any greeting. She was sitting on the floor, as was Harrington, the broken-down gentleman who was coeval with Flora in Bonnybell’s acquaintance with that lady; the broken-down gentleman who, beginning by being her lover, had ended by being her major-domo.

Upon Flora’s lap sat the little old dachshund Lisa, down whose throat Harrington was trying to drive a pill. By holding her mouth tight shut, and stroking her throat, the object was supposed to have been, after many previous failures, attained. The fallacy of the deduction was proved an hour later by the pill being found intact on the front stairs, showing that the wily Lisa had, after all, bested her physicians; but for the present, lulled in a false security, Lisa’s mistress was able to remember her visitor’s presence.

“Wasn’t it fortunate that Harrington should have happened to be at the station just in time to see your old monster get into the train? I said to myself, ‘Now is my time.’ I had been puzzling my head as to how I was going to get at you. I could not come after you. You know I am tolerably facile à vivre, but I cannot stand that old woman.”

Truth is truth, even if inverted, and Bonnybell did not think it necessary to point out that in this case it was standing on its head; since, in point{162} of fact, it was “that old woman” who had never been able to “stand” Lady Tennington.

“I had scarcely a word with you at the Aylmers’,” continued Flora, raising her rather bulky form from the floor by the aid of Harrington, whom she immediately afterwards sent out of the room. “You were packed off to Meg and that odious prig of a governess for fear that I should corrupt your mind, I suppose.”

She laughed, both with cosmetic-ed lips and with eyes that, though brazenly bistered, were jolly and good-natured, at the humour of such a thing being possible; and Bonnybell laughed too, though with a surprised sense of annoyance at the unlimited knowledge of evil attributed to her.

“The governess’s and Meg’s?” with an accent of delighted interest. “Oh, how it must have improved them!”

As she spoke, she held out an expensive and floridly coronetted cigarette-case to the girl, who pounced upon it as the camel upon a desert pool.

There was a short silence of rapturous enjoyment on Bonnybell’s part. Flora had pushed her into a luxurious chair, and the smoke was going up to heaven from her pink nostrils. She was beginning to be glad of her iniquity, even though the Toby for whom it was committed had proved to be but a mirage.{163}

“How did you corrupt their minds?” The question shared Lady Tennington’s mouth with a cigarette; but, though a little inarticulate from this cause, the relish in it was unmistakable.

The interest aroused by this statement vanquished material enjoyment, and Lady Tennington took the “Savory” from between her rosy lips, and sat up.

“Will you believe it?” replied Bonnybell, sitting up too, her eyes sparkling intensely in the relief and enjoyment of having at length found a confidant certain to sympathize in the grievous wrong done her. “All that I said was—I was looking at a silly little newspaper with Meg, and I happened to mention—we had come to a picture of Cressida Beaulieu and her Schipperkes—that Waddy ran her. Could you imagine that there was any one in the world so ignorant as not to know that Waddy ran Cressida?”

“It is inconceivable,” replied Flora, in an almost awed tone; and there was a moment or two of wondering and compassionate silence on the part of both.

“They came and laid a formal complaint against me next day, and I was sent for down from my studies—I was at my studies, if you please”—with a delightful little grimace.

“Your studies!” laughing significantly. “I should have thought that you knew as much as most people.{164}”

“Oh, what a time I had of it!” she exclaimed, gliding with only half-unconscious distaste from the subject of her own discreditable omniscience. “What a scolding!”

“Yes, from Camilla. But she is not quite all hateful. I thought she was at first, but she isn’t. After having ground me to powder—while those two women looked on—oh, I should like to be even with them!—she told me she would give me another chance! It doesn’t sound any great catch,” beginning to laugh heartily; “but I can assure you that I was very much relieved, as I felt certain that I was going to be turned out then and there, neck and crop.”

The phrase, in one sense, was scarcely a happy one, since it could not, by any stretch of language, be considered a good thing for any young woman to be taken under the soiled and tarnished wing of Lady Tennington.

Bonnybell’s heart did not in the least echo the aspiration, but her lips brought out their “It would have been too delightful for words!” with their accustomed lying glibness.

She looked with pretty, grateful affection at her hostess as she spoke, asking herself alternately whether it was that she had forgotten Flora, or that the latter had lost her eye and donned a greenlier gold wig than of yore, imparted a more{165} sealing-waxy red to her mouth, and laid the powder on her nose, thick as snow on the summit of the Jung Frau, without knowing it.

“Tell me some more,” said the unconscious object of these silent queries, in the delighted voice of a child asking for the repetition of a favourite fairy tale. “Ah, here is Charlie Landon? I told you you would meet an old friend. You must begin all over again for him.{166}”

CHAPTER XV

So this was the “old friend” with whom the hook for her had been partially baited! Charlie Landon, the hero of that dinner at the Réservoir at Versailles; Charlie Landon, the odious old voluptuary most detested by her of all her mother’s disreputable entourage; the one whose degrading admiration and nauseous overtures she had had the most difficulty in keeping within decent bounds; Charlie Landon!

Was it to meet Charlie Landon, whom she would have compassed sea and land to avoid, that she had imperilled her salvation?—for indeed the sure refuge of the house into which she had found admittance seemed to her, in this sudden terror of deservedly losing it, to spell no less a thing. She had never seen the hateful old satyr face since the Versailles evening, as some blessed accident summoned its owner back to England on the day following it.

That Flora was quite ignorant of her young guest’s attitude of mind towards her old one was evident both from that known good-nature of hers, which would never willingly place any two people in an uncomfortable situation, and also{167} from the fact that before Charlie had become a prominent person in the ever-narrowing circle of Claire’s friends, Flora had seen herself obliged to withdraw from it personally.

Lady Tennington rather liked Charlie. He did not make love to her, and she would not have minded if he had, and his fund of indelicate anecdotes amused her. It was upon his own representation of the affectionate intimacy existing between himself and the young girl—for in the accomplishment of lying Charlie could have given Bonnybell herself points—that the invitation to meet him had gone forth veiled in the anonymity which was most likely to produce the desired effect.

Perhaps it was because Miss Bonnybell’s features, though equally practised in dissimulation, were not so expert at it as her tongue, but certainly it was that something which was not of the expected quality had expressed itself in the girl’s face, and given a surprised and interrogative quality to Flora’s next words.

“Charlie wanted to go and fetch you, but I would not let him. I wanted to have the pleasure of seeing your pleasure at so unexpected a meeting. He tells me that you became such dear friends after—after I left Paris.”

But by this time Miss Ransome was herself again. Charlie would be a dangerous enemy, and might let out or purposely disclose circumstances in her past history—circumstances due not to her fault, indeed, but to her misfortune—yet does the world ever nicely discriminate between the{168} two?—which might seriously prejudice her future. She had no more doubt of Charlie’s vindictiveness than of his sensuality, and there was as much need to be on guard against the one as against the other. So she submitted her hand, which he insisted upon kissing, to his clasp, and answered with perfect civility—

“Yes, it is quite a surprise. I had not an idea that Colonel Landon was down here.”

“Colonel Landon!” repeated he, with an affectation of reproachful astonishment. “How formal we have grown all of a sudden!”

There was an odious implication of former intimacy in his tone, and Flora, who had begun to laugh at it, stopped suddenly, arrested by the undisguisable repulsion which pierced through the set smile on her young friend’s face.

“You would not wonder at anything,” she cried hastily, “if you knew the sort of people the poor thing has fallen amongst. Do tell Charlie, Bonnybell, about your experiences with the Aylmers; he would be so much amused, and I could not hear them too often.”

But Bonnybell had, with all her knowledge of Charlie’s power of revengeful tit-for-tat in the case of a supposed snub, done as much for him as she could for the moment manage, and she excused herself with pretty ingenuity, asserting, with a smile that was ordered still to keep well to the front, that the anecdote could be entertaining only to a person acquainted with the Aylmer family, and would lose all its point in the case of one who had not that advantage. Inwardly, while{169} uttering her little apology for refusing, she was sharply regretting that her glove had been taken off previous to the “old friend’s” detested caress, and wondering how soon she would cease to be conscious of it on the back of her hand.

The announcement of luncheon put a welcome end to the importunities to which her refusal subjected her. The sight of one more place laid at the table than there were occupants for made her draw the inference that the “new friend” had been expected, and had failed to appear, but she waited in vain for some comment upon his absence. To Lady Tennington’s easy-going board people came or not as they chose. If they appeared at it, so much the better; if they didn’t appear at it, not so very much the worse. In Flora’s circle promises and engagements did not go for much, nor did the breaking of them cause her either annoyance or surprise.

The conversation at the repast was chiefly in Charlie’s hands and under his guidance. He was a past-master in the art of double-entendre, and had a power that it would be difficult to surpass of giving to the most plain and innocent sentences an indecent meaning. From off the guileless backs of most English girls Charlie’s conversation could fall in a harmless cascade, as being too bad to be understood, but there was not one of his innuendoes and perverse twistings of the commonplaces of speech that Bonnybell did not fully comprehend, with the added knowledge that he knew that she did so.

Flora called him to order once or twice, but{170} not very severely. Charlie was really very amusing; and, after all, Bonnybell was not like other girls. It was such a comfort that one need not be on one’s P’s and Q’s with her.

Scarcely ever, in all the reach of her eighteen years’ memory, had Miss Ransome sat at a feast—and Flora’s cuisine deserved that title—with a more uneasy and unenjoying mind. Not even the unwonted solace of as many post-luncheon cigarettes as she could desire at all compensated her for the distastefulness of the company, or for the racking twin anxieties that occupied her mind; the anxiety to get home as fast as possible, so as to obviate all risk of discovery incident upon a possible change of plan in Mr. and Mrs. Tancred, and to prevent Charlie from escorting her. All her manœuvres to get her hostess alone in order to ask for her aid in obtaining this latter boon having failed, she had to content herself with the meagre consolation that, at all events, she would have the chaperonage of the chauffeur.

Immediately after luncheon the rest of the party sat down to dummy bridge. It was not without loud outcries on the part of two of her companions, and some umbrage at the gentle fixity of her determination not to make a fourth—for Harrington never dared show umbrage at anything—that Bonnybell escaped their upbraiding importunities. If she allowed herself to acquiesce, Heaven knows how long she might be chained to the card-table, when once they had got hold of her, and her longed-for departure postponed if she was not firm. But it was not without paying{171} the toll of some gibing jests at her benefactors’ expense—jests which she did not in the least enjoy, and which caused her an unexpected subsequent remorse—that she was let off, and given the inspiriting promise that the motor should be at the door in half an hour’s time. She waited to hear the message really given, and then to escape the pursuit of Charlie’s eyes, which, though not so good as they had been, were still only too embarrassing, she left the trio, to resume her hat and wraps.

In former days Bonnybell had never been in time for anything, but to-day, though twenty minutes must elapse before the motor was due, she stood restless and troubled, awaiting its arrival in a conservatory which opened out of the room in which the players had settled down to their mutilated gamble. She could hear, between the deals, Charlie firing off his double-entendres to lighten the seriousness of the pursuit, and Flora’s stimulating rebuke, “Oh, come, Charlie, that is rather too stiff. You must remember that we have a fille à marier on the premises.” And then they all laughed.

Well they might! thought the listener. A fille à marier! And yet that was precisely what she was! With what other purpose but the insane one of furthering that object was she there? And how likely were such a milieu and atmosphere to promote it!

The conservatory was a long one, and by walking to the end of it she could get out of earshot of the bridge-players. Why go on listening to{172} Charlie for twenty minutes, if she could help it? A cluster of wicker chairs stood under a palm, and into the cushions of one of them she sank, looking round with uneasy eyes upon the mass of bloom about her. She did not care a straw about flowers in their natural and out-door state, and forced ones represented to her mind out-of-season extravagances of ten and twenty-five guinea January bouquets—represented to her the past and Claire.

What a fool she had been! Had ever any one risked so much to gain so little? Thinking it over coolly—that was just what she could not do, since so much was at stake—what were the odds in favour of her getting home undetected? Even if she did so, the danger was by no means over. A slip of the tongue, a stupidity, a malice on the part of one of the servants, happening any time during the next six months, might wreck her. She must be very, very civil and pleasant to the whole establishment. If she got any étrennes in the shape of money, she would have to tip them heavily; and yet even so, she would never be able to be quite free from anxiety.

She trusted to be put out of suspense as to her worst fear—that of a premature return from London on the part of the Tancreds—in half an hour from the present moment. The return journey could not take more than fifteen or twenty minutes.

Her worst fear! Wasn’t there yet a worse than the worst?—the fear that Charlie might this time carry his point, and insist on escorting her{173} back? Since the motor was a brougham, of what possible use or protection could the chauffeur be? Should she beg Harrington to come too? But it was a single brougham!

The sound of steps approaching roused her. Well, this was a bit of luck! She would get off sooner than she had thought possible; for here was a footman coming to tell her that the ark of her salvation was at the door. But the owner of the nearing footfall did not wear Flora’s livery.

“I was sent to look for you!” observed a young and manly, but not very gracious voice.

The heart of the fille à marier gave a jump up from her boots, to which it had latterly been sinking. Late, but not quite too late, here was the Toby for whom she had sacrificed, suffered, and imperilled so much!

This was perfectly true, but that was not at all the reason why she uttered it! A rapid calculation resulted in the conclusion that in the very short time allotted to her, if she ever wished to make an effect—and oh, didn’t she wish it?—the stroke of her brush must be broad. This was neither the place, the time, nor the object for caution. The impulsive pleasure of one too young and inexperienced to hide a keen pleasure that had taken her by surprise, the outbreak of an emotion too glad and strong to be kept in the leading-strings of convention,—this was the appearance to be aimed at, and which the full look which she allowed her large fawn eyes to{174} take of his fresh-coloured stolid face told her was achieved.

Toby, who, despite his stodgy shyness, was possessed of quite enough conceit to keep him in a competence, if not affluence, of self-esteem, saw no reason why he should doubt that this effusive young stranger was excessively glad to see him.

The young stranger, on her part, was pleased to have made her meaning plain; but, having done so, gave maiden modesty at having been surprised into such an admission its turn.

“You must forgive my saying what seems silly and exaggerated, considering how little I know you; but——” Then a sudden inspiration came to the prettily embarrassed, and yet really harassed, young creature. Why not kill two birds with one stone? Give herself an interest in the eyes of this block of a Toby, if he was stupid enough not to have already conceived one, by enlisting his sympathy and help; and in so doing also baffle the abhorred Charlie? No sooner thought than uttered, with no apparent hitch or hindrance in the smooth run of her sentence: “But the moment I saw you the thought struck me how much—how enormously you might help me if you would.”

There was marked surprise in the tone, but there was also, if the hearer erred not, a hint of gratification and a willingness to hear more.

“You give me the idea”—permitting herself to take timid stock of him as she spoke—“of being{175} very determined, and able to make people mind what you say.”

Bonnybell hesitated a moment, both to heighten the evident curiosity that she had roused, and because she was divided between two or three artistic openings. But her time was running out. She must not allow herself to hesitate.

There was such a distinct tone of offence at the suggestion in this robust disclaimer, that Bonnybell clasped her little black hands, which she had on several former occasions found to be so invaluable as “properties,” in an ecstasy of relief.

“Oh, I am so glad!” After all, it was pleasant and refreshing to tell truth as a change once in a way, and with a judicious economy.

“I can’t imagine how Lady Tennington could have asked you to meet such a beastly old reprobate!”

The stodgy face had lit up, and the vigour of its owner’s vernacular found an echo in Miss Ransome’s inmost soul.

“A beastly old reprobate!” Oh, if Toby knew all! Yet caution and the dread of Charlie’s vengeance, and his power of revelation, prompted her to say—

“I knew him when I was a child, and I should not like to hurt his feelings. But I am a little afraid that he will want to take me back to{176} Stillington in the motor, and—and—it is a brougham!”

A quarter of an hour later Bonnybell was flashing homeward alone, having accidentally happened to mention to the preserver, whom she had successfully enlisted in her service, the fact of her passionate fondness for wandering in parks at winter gloamings, and having received from him in return information of almost excessive accuracy as to those parts of the Stillington Deer Park which might be safely visited at that time of year by a solitary stroller.{177}

CHAPTER XVI

All was safe. There had been no change of plan on the part of Miss Ransome’s protectors, as, drawing a long breath, she realized on reaching home, and joyfully found the house as destitute of its masters as she had left it. To begin at once the attack upon the servants’ clemency was her next care. Bonnybell had always been charming in her manner towards all dependants; but the tone in which she now asked the butler after a sick wife whom Camilla had been doctoring, and told the housemaid, whom she found lighting her bedroom fire, how concerned she was to hear her still coughing, would have wiled “the savageness out of a bear.”

Her neglected studies were her next thought, but an unconquerable distaste towards resuming them made her persuade herself that it would be unsafe to run the risk of being found studying at so unusual an hour, and would lead to the inference that she had been playing the truant earlier. It would be better to take the least evadable books up to bed with her, and make what scrambling preparation she could before{178} going to sleep. While collecting her authors, the young student became aware of “L’Enigme du Péché” lying in tell-tale openness on the floor, where it had evidently lain since it fell off her lap in the hurry of her departure. Another sigh of relief, almost as deep as the first, signalized this timely discovery.

Camilla was in unusually good spirits at dinner that night. Her day, though she was strictly silent upon that part, had been tiring, boring, self-sacrificing. It had been devoted wholly to the unhealthy, the unprosperous, and the ungrateful. But apparently it had had a tonic effect, and she ate her slender allowance of food with more apparent enjoyment, and talked more and more cheerfully, than usual. Perhaps it was because she talked more that Edward seemed to talk less than his never garrulous custom.

Bonnybell could wish that Mrs. Tancred’s inclination to converse would have led her in another direction than inquiries as to the mode in which she, Bonnybell, had disposed of her solitary day, though those inquiries were made almost genially, and in the spirit of neither a school-mistress nor a spy. It was not that the girl was conscious of any new or even nascent disinclination for fibbing; but when the whole field of invention lay open before her, it was so difficult to know which lie to choose. Lie she must, from beginning to end of the catechism that ensued, but she had no wish to be excessive, nor to daub{179} where one coat of paint would serve her purpose. It was a pity that the servants had to hear her, as, of course, they must be laughing in their sleeves; but the tips to be administered doubled themselves in her intention, and she tried to forget the silent presences that might become so ruinously vocal.

“Did you make up your mind to tear yourself from the fireside at all to-day?”

So far truth carried her, but nervousness made her add an unnecessary gloss, which was the falsest of falsehoods—in implication, at least—

“H’m! how far did you go? I dare say not farther than the houses. I know that the stove house is the kind of atmosphere you really like.”

Camilla was in wonderfully good tune; there was even an attempt at genial raillery in her tone.

Truth again reappeared. It was as well to give that seldom-invoked goddess a look-in now and then.

“You did not, I am sure, risk those ridiculous little shoes of yours in the wet grass of the park?”

“Oh yes, I did; they are stronger than they look. But I was sorry afterwards that{180} I had. Jock got among the rabbit-holes, and though I whistled and called for ten minutes, I am sure, I could not persuade him to come out.”

There was a noise as of a small object falling on the floor. Edward, who was not generally clumsy, had whisked a fork, with his coat-cuff apparently, on to the carpet. A footman picked it up, and the conversation proceeded. But Miss Ransome had caught a glimpse of her host’s face, and a cold sweat broke out inside her. Was it possible that Edward knew of her escapade? There was nothing for it but to hope for the best, and to go on boldly, since she was already too far immersed in the sea of fancy to withdraw. And besides, what she had been relating of Jock’s perversity was strictly true, only that it was post-dated by twenty-four hours, having happened yesterday.

“Jock must have had two walks to-day, then, for Gillett told me she had taken him out.”

Bonnybell’s heart quailed. Suppose that Camilla next inquired at what hour her promenade with Jock had taken place, and that she herself in answer hit upon the same one as that already claimed by the maid?

“It must have been in the morning, then, that you took him out,” continued Camilla, still perfectly unsuspicious, adding, with a sternness that was more affected than real, “You must{181} have given him time that was filched from your reading.”

“He looked so wistful,” replied Bonnybell, post-dating Jock’s expression of emotion, as she had done his iniquities. “It is so difficult to resist him when he looks wistful.”

This was a thrust directed at the one weak spot in Camilla’s armour, and it penetrated at once.

“What a bad dog!” she said, in a ridiculously pseudo-angry voice. How different, as Bonnybell ruefully reflected, from that employed to herself, for the far smaller crime of her attempt to educate Meg Aylmer! “No biscuits to-night.”

In the execution of this threat Jock did not even affect credulity, but wagged a short black tail, which was in piquant contrast to the rest of his white body, and Bonnybell heaved her slender shoulders in a deep inspiration of relief, once again involuntarily stealing a look at Edward. She found him looking straight and full back at her, in the security of Camilla’s occupation with the dog; read in that look that he knew; that since he had promised her his friendship he would not betray her, and that he despised her from the bottom of his heart. In point of fact, Edward was not much in the habit of despising any one but himself, but he might have made an exception in Bonnybell’s favour.

The belief that he had done so, at all events, depressed that young woman to such a degree as to impart an inattentive languor to her nightly{182} dancing lesson to Jock. That unworthy animal took a base advantage of her absent-mindedness, and executed his part of the performance on all four feet, in a shabby, ambling run, which, not even by his partial mistress, could be classified as a “trick.”

“You seem to have tired yourself with your walk,” observed Camilla, noticing the limp air of relief with which Miss Ransome subsided into a chair at the end of a display which was generally a source of unmixed enjoyment to her. “Of course, I have no wish that you should overdo yourself; there is never any sense in extremes.”

Bonnybell drooped her head in silent acquiescence. Circumstances prevented her defending herself from the charge of over-exercise by stating the fact that the longest walk she had to-day taken had been from one end of Lady Tennington’s conservatory to the other, and she felt unequal for the moment to the framing of new inventions, which one of her hearers would be perfectly aware to be such.

“Perhaps it is because the wind has not caught your face to-day,” continued Mrs. Tancred, in caustic but not hostile allusion to Bonnybell’s former explanation of her excess of bloom, “but you look pale to-night. Neither Edward—I think I may answer for you,” with a scarcely inquiring spectacled glance at her husband—“nor I will take it amiss if you feel inclined to go to bed.”

The girl accepted, with apologetic courtesy,{183} which she tried not to make too eager. Not even the sight of the piled books by her bedside, heaped there with an intention of midnight study, could lessen the sense of relaxed tension in being alone. She was tired, dispirited, anxious, with sore disquiet for the future.

Edward knew that she was a liar, and hated her for being one. More shame for him! If he had been in her grievous straits, he would have lied too. It was very unsympathetic and borné of him not to understand that! Now that Charlie Landon was aware that she was in the neighbourhood, he would never leave her in peace. Did she not read an intention of persecution in the baffled anger of his face when it was made clear to him by Flora that his escort was to be dispensed with?

Yes, the future was heavy with clouds, and she regarded it, as has been said, with some disquiet. Yet her repentance for the past was by no means complete. If Edward and Charlie—unnatural alliance of names!—weighed down one scale of the balance, did not Toby in the other make it greatly out-dip them? The campaign against Toby—hitherto existing only in aspiration and intention—had passed into the domain of fact. It had really and seriously opened, and how artistically too, by that sudden inspiration or an appeal for help. A stroke of such genius had enabled her to skip over at least a dozen preliminary steps, and rushed him into the propitious situation of benefactor and rescuer before he knew where he was.{184}

“Never in my life have I managed to get hold of anything good or pleasant without having to pay heavily for it,” she said to herself in bitter retrospect, “and I suppose that it will always be so; but, at all events, this time I have something to show for my efforts! ‘Quite safe to walk anywhere between the belt of firs on the left of the big covert and the group of Spanish chestnuts near the gazebo.’ Quite safe for me, I suppose he meant! I would not swear that it was quite as safe for him!”

She fell asleep with an angelic smile on her parted lips at the thought of Toby’s insecurity, the pile of unopened books forgotten beside her.

An hour later a figure, who had carefully chosen that one of the electric burners to turn up whose light would not fall on the sleeper’s face, stood by Bonnybell’s bedside.

“I do not think that that child is well,” Camilla had said, after an interval of silence, addressing her husband; “she seemed unnaturally depressed. Depression under such circumstances as hers would be natural and proper in any thinking being, but as she certainly does not come under that head, there must be some other cause.”

As she spoke Mrs. Tancred left her chair and the room. Her absence lasted for a quarter of an hour, and towards the end of it Edward grew restless; that is to say, inwardly, for he allowed himself no change of posture that would recognize or indulge his uneasiness. Was she ill? and if{185} so, was hers the kind of constitution upon which illness would take much hold? Both her parents had died when well under forty, but as neither of their deaths could be called natural ones, their shortlivedness could not be held to lend probability to hers, unless her mother’s tendencies were hereditary.

“I was mistaken,” she said calmly, though his eye noted the sign of an emotion of some kind on her harsh face; “she was sleeping quite quietly.”

Both settled down again to their occupations, and a few minutes elapsed before Camilla, bringing out the words as one forced to make an admission against the grain, said—

“I am afraid that my tendency is to judge people too severely; and I believe that in the case of this unfortunate girl I may have done so.”

She paused, and he had time for an inwardly interjected wish that she had used some other adjective than that which, employed as a noun, had such an unsavoury significance when applied to a woman!

“I am led to think that some glimmer of a sense of right and wrong is awakening in her; that I trace some germ of a desire for better things!”

“You heard at dinner to-day how she had conquered her dislike to leaving the fireside in{186} deference to my wishes; it came out quite unostentatiously—not as if she were making a merit of it.”

Perhaps it was surprise at the change in his wife’s tone that hindered Tancred from expressing that pleased acquiescence in their joint incubus’s improvement which might have been expected; but neither did he give any sign of dissent.

“And though she could not have expected a visit from me to-night—I have never before gone near her,” continued Camilla, in the key of one resolved to make her amends for possible former injustice handsome and complete—“she had evidently taken to heart my reproach of having wasted the time, that should have been devoted to study, upon the dog.” (When Camilla occasionally tried to make her family believe that she was indifferent to Jock, she spoke of him as “the dog.”) “The poor girl had evidently been at work until overtaken by sleep, for the books were piled at her bedside.”

Edward must make some comment now, and must try not to let it be too stony; but the “Indeed! how very creditable!” which he at last brought out sounded to himself so coldly ironical that it must rouse his wife’s suspicions by its contrast with his former championship. To his relief, he soon perceived that she was occupied by a train of thought, and stirred by an emotion which blunted her powers of observation.

“She looked very sweet and innocent,” Mrs. Tancred said, in a softened tone, as one recalling a gentle, dreamy vision; “all traces of her terrible{187} heredity wiped away by sleep!” After a short pause in a lower key, “The All Wise gave one more proof of All Wisdom in denying me the blessing of children, for I should have made idols of them.{188}”

CHAPTER XVII

It was a source of mixed wonder and thankfulness to Miss Ransome on the succeeding day that she got off so cheaply when the discovery of the extent to which she had neglected her studies was made. The rebuke incurred was so inexplicably gentle, that though by this time Bonnybell was pretty well acquainted with the directness of her instructress’s methods, she at first suspected that a trap must lie beneath it. She did not know that she had been saved by her usual means, a lie; only that in this case it was an innocent and unintentional one, the lie, namely, of the piled books at her bedside. She escaped with a more sorrowful than indignant expression of opinion from Camilla as to the slenderness of her intellect and her inability to grasp any subjects other than those appertaining to the cult of the frivolous and the trashy.

Insults to her intellect left Miss Ransome perfectly calm. She had long believed the truth of the saying that “Hard words break no bones,” having been dieted upon expletives and adjectives both vigorous and varied whenever “poor Claire” was “not quite right.” Were her mind{189} furnished as Camilla would have it, she might become a second Miss Barnacre, and all that she would know of men would be the banging of doors by them, in hastening from her presence whenever she lifted up her voice in the odious terminology of science and philosophy.

Snubs to her appearance, occasionally administered on hygienic principles by Mrs. Tancred, left her equally good-humoured, though from another cause. Having grown up with her beauty from babyhood, she was as sure of possessing it as she was of possessing hands or a palate. Any one who did not think her pretty must be either blind or jesting. It was valued highly by her, as being the only means of escape she had from the sordid darkness of her outlook. But it was not the source of pleasure to her which their good looks afforded to most handsome women. It had been associated with too many disagreeables; had obliged her to struggle against too many imminent degradations, for her to have much fondness for it, apart from its commercial value as a matrimonial asset.

The serenely sweet acquiescence with which Miss Ransome received the information given as to the unusual smallness of the mind power with which she had been endowed still further increased her teacher’s leniency.

“She thinks that I am half-witted,” said Miss Ransome to herself, “and it will certainly be wiser to encourage her in the idea, as she will expect less of me. In her present mood I might safely finish ‘L’Enigme du Péché’ without fear of{190} detection, but”—with a slight sense of unwonted repulsion—“I don’t think I care to; it is too like Charlie.”

To escape the odious memory evoked, Bonnybell diverted her thoughts into another channel. “What induced her to come up to my room last night? I felt sure it was because she had found me out, and I thought it safer to sham being asleep till I could make up my mind what excuse to offer. And why, in Heaven’s name, did she kiss me?”

The girl lost herself in contradictory solutions of this enigma. Was it in order to test the reality of her slumbers or to break them that Camilla had inflicted that astounding caress? Or was it humanly possible that the poor old lady was growing a little fond of her, and treated her as she would have done a young Camilla? The notion, to her own surprise, touched her oddly at first, but she shook off the sensation almost indignantly. How likely! She drove away her own inchoate softness by exchanging it for the ridiculous thought of what a hideous object a sleeping young Camilla would have been, and how impossible that in wildest fancy she could have been mistaken for such an imaginary monster.

“I always knew that Camilla would be easier to take in than Edward,” pursued Miss Ransome, a rather anxious wrinkle furrowing her brow; “and it is unlucky that just as I had brought him round, his belief in me should have received this fresh shock. With him now I have, I am afraid, my work cut out.{191}”

The ensuing days justified this forecast. There could be no doubt that Edward was in possession of the fact that she had taken “the key of the fields.” “He must have heard it at the stables,” was Bonnybell’s conclusion; “but how could I ward off that? How could I ask all the grooms and helpers after their colds, or offer them anti-kamnia for their wives’ neuralgias? In this case I am not to blame. It is my misfortune, not my fault.”

Misfortune or fault, the result remained the same; Edward did not betray her. It did not surprise her that he refrained from doing so, though it was only doubtfully that she attributed his silence to loyalty to that promise of friendship which she had extracted from him.

Loyalty to given promises was not a quality with which she had ever had more than a bowing acquaintance. In all probability it was a taste for peace, coupled with the knowledge of what a terrific household storm his communication would arouse, that sealed his lips. Doubtless during the last fifteen years he had had frequent need of reticences and concealments on his own account. But whatever the cause of his conduct, Miss Ransome had regretfully to own that it was not due to any of that lurking partiality for herself, with which she had, up to yesterday evening, credited him. If his eye met hers—a rencounter apparently neither sought nor avoided—no grain of admiration was to be detected in its cold beam. A repelled curiosity, a sort of frosty wonder was all that was to be read in it.{192}

However, a philosophic mind is able to see the good derivable from even the least propitious set of circumstances. There was an advantageous side even to Edward’s objectionable attitude. She would never be in the least afraid of being left alone in the same room with him. The fears apparently were all on the other side. She laughed to herself jeeringly. Would any one believe it? And yet it was true, that without overtly seeming to seek that end, her host undoubtedly avoided her.

She set herself with all the power of the wits her benefactress held so cheaply to propitiate him. But it was a path beset with pitfalls. His ideas, springs of action, standards were so radically different from those she had been used to find in the men of her acquaintance, that experience lent no candle to light her steps. She had learnt, indeed, by the process of burning her fingers at the flame kindled at one taper, that any discussion of Camilla’s body or mind, any comments on her actions, however mendaciously flattering, were to be shunned like the plague. But even thus much of progress was negative, and held out little hope, as a method of rebuilding his good opinion. What were his weak spots? And what chance had she of finding them out, if he never indulged her in any enlightening talk about himself? It was chiefly interest and the desire for a valuable ally in her arduous life battle that prompted her efforts to bring him round, but mixed with it was a worthier regret at having forfeited the only chance of a pure and honourable friendship with{193} a man that her short ignoble life had yet offered her.

For several days she cast her little cautious nets in vain. Not a worthless sprat did the meshes enfold when drawn to land. He must be vulnerable somewhere, if only it were given her to discover the spot. The days passed in the fruitless search, and by the time the second Sunday came round since the disaster of her falsehood—or, as she would have it, the disaster of its discovery—she was almost desperate of success. On that day an idea struck her, which she hastened to put into execution. Luncheon was just over. Camilla had retired to her weekly stock-taking of her spiritual condition, and Edward was in the act of withdrawing himself, as he had done on the previous Sunday, for the whole afternoon. This self-effacement of his might have had its advantages, by leaving her free to carry out any innocent project of her own, but the motive that prompted it was at once too obvious and too distressing in its results not to demand one more urgent effort for its renewal. He had the door-handle already in his hand, when she addressed him so pointedly that politeness—and in that, at all events, he had never been lacking—compelled him to pause a moment to listen.

“I noticed,” she said, with what sounded like the painful diffidence of one making a great effort over herself, “that you did not go to the Dower House last Sunday.”

“No.” There was a slight inflection of chilly surprise in his monosyllable.{194}

“I do not think that you have been there since the day you kindly took me to tea?”

“No?” The monosyllable was interrogative this time, and seemed discouragingly to ask what the drift of these idle remarks might be.

“I think I have understood that you always used to go there every Sunday afternoon?”

It was on the edge of his lips to say carelessly that he believed he did call on the Aylmers now and then; but with a timely realization of the necessity of giving her the example of a rigid truthfulness he answered, still with that daunting air of cold wonder as to her purpose in putting the question, that such had been his weekly habit.

“You will forgive me if I am mistaken,” she said, with a half-frightened meekness that would have wiled “the savageness out of a bear,” “but I have sometimes been afraid that I had come between you and your friends.”

She had hit the nail so exactly on the head, that the nearest approach to denial of her suggestion within his reach was a “You?” that sounded to himself a contemptible paltering with the truth, and to her a cold snubbing of her presumption.

“I am not so silly as to dream that any liking for me was your motive,” Bonnybell went on with an exquisite humility. “Why should you like me? What is there to like in me?” (The question was accompanied by a sorrowful smile which evoked within its executor the reflection, “If that harrowing contortion does not fetch him, I may as well shut up shop!”) “But I feared that perhaps your generosity had resented their{195} unnecessarily harsh treatment of such a forlorn creature!”

Answer to this speech would in any case have been difficult, and apparently Edward found it more than difficult, impossible, for he made none; and with a more dragging tone and a heavier spirit Miss Ransome took up her apparently useless little parable.

“If I am mistaken, I can only ask you to forgive me—I am always having to ask people to forgive me—but I could not bear the idea of coming between you and—people you are fond of.”

“Thank you; but indeed you need not distress yourself. I am going to the Dower House to-day,” he answered, with his usual gentle intonation, perhaps a little hurried from its wonted leisureliness, and so left the room, giving her no opportunity for a rejoinder.

Bonnybell, left to herself thus cursorily, walked to the Venetian mirror nearest her, carrying with her as nearly as possible the expression her face had worn during this last successless venture, in order to judge of what ought to have been its efficacy; and then, exhaling a large sigh, soliloquized, “H’m! I might as well have saved my eloquence, my magnanimity, the tremble in my voice (I am afraid that I am not quite sparing enough in the use of that), and my heartbroken smile, which really was a masterpiece in its way. Bah! and all for one poor harmless indispensable fib! What a ridiculously warped view to take!” She gave a little snort of indignation, but the{196} place where her heart ought to be, and as she had always supposed was not, felt oddly sore.

Neither had Edward’s heart much leap about its actions as he took his way—the way weekly trod by his Sunday feet—to the house where until a fortnight ago he had found pleasant, if not excessive, entertainment for his spirit. It shocked him to find how laggardly that spirit guided him to-day. There was nothing changed in the reciprocal attitude of the Aylmers and himself. Mrs. Aylmer would give him the geniality of her matter-of-course welcome, and to whomsoever Catherine was talking at the moment of his entrance, he would find her—for it was an unwritten law of their recognized comradeship—by his side in as many or as few moments as civility—for Catherine was nothing if not civil—demanded to rid her of her interlocutor. He was always treated like one of the family, but to-day the kind imitation of kinship offered had no charm for him; and he felt a dead reluctance towards the occupation of that wainscoted recess, with none of the secretiveness of a corner, yet all its privacy, where in the course of a good many consecutive Sundays his gentle friend with the candid if not quite straight eyes had made him the happy master of her sentiments about some of the greatest themes upon which our poor intelligences turn the dark lanterns of their groping speculations, and, pleasanter still, had lured some of his own shy imaginings out of him. Cart-ropes should not drag him to that friendship-hallowed window-seat this afternoon. And yet he must not hurt the{197} feelings of his comrade! Why shouldn’t he? The question rose rather brutally in his mind. He had had no scruples as to hurting the feelings of another person, of one whose wretched circumstances claimed a much tenderer handling than the full-blown prosperity of Miss Aylmer.

He stopped in his walk to look up as if in interrogation to the ash-coloured sky, hung so low over his head, that it seemed as if touchable by an uplifted hand.

“How long can I keep up the pretence of harshness with the poor little creature? Why should I be angrier with her than I was with Jock for killing rats in the barn yesterday? Both follow their nature; she her shifty lying one. She is a liar! Yes, but am I not one too? Is not my whole life an actual lie? If it had only been one or two”—his thoughts harping in exasperated pain on Bonnybell’s delinquencies—“they might have been accidents, the result of that abject fear she evidently feels towards us both. But the dreadful glibness of it! the plausibility! the circumstantiality!” The circumstantiality brought him to the Dower House door, and rang the bell for him.{198}

CHAPTER XVIII

The moon unexpectedly lighted Mr. Tancred home. As if she had something agreeable to show him, she had shoved and elbowed aside the smoke-coloured curtains, drawn so closely across the sky when he arrived, and though still vapourish and a little sickly, gave radiance enough by which to distinguish objects. At first her lamp seemed officious. He could find his way home blindfolded along the familiar path, but before the end of his walk he discovered a use for it.

The evening air was mild and mawkish, and it was not because he was chilly that he covered the ground quickly. It was unlikely—scarcely possible—that anything untoward could have happened during his hour’s absence; yet he had heard something at the Dower House which made him eager to verify by his own eyesight the fact that the terrible charge committed to him was still safe, that he should surprise her as he did last Sunday, sampling his best cigarettes over the fire in the smoking-room, to which he had betaken himself earlier than her calculations had led her to expect, and where the austerity of his own manner had routed her, not in repentance for her{199} theft, which at this moment she was probably repeating, but in confusion at its discovery.

His wife had no toleration for female smokers. How, then, did he reconcile it to his conscience that, before leaving that wife’s house this afternoon, he had placed the box of cigarettes, of the brand of Miss Ransome’s predilection, where she could not possibly miss it? Yes, undoubtedly he would find his little lazy, lying inmate, with her depraved instincts and her seraphic eyes, stretched disconsolately on an armchair, scheming some false new wheedlings by which to undermine his principles and cajole him out of his just displeasure.

His reason was convinced that there was no need for haste, and yet he hastened. The moon was getting the better of the vapours as she walked higher up the low sky; and at even some distance off he could see not only the dark bodies of the deer moving in the open spaces between the dead bracken, but could distinguish the branched heads of the stags.

Presently other objects made themselves out against the steel-washed dusk. Neither were they unfamiliar, since a right-of-way, which for a century had vexed the souls of the owners of Stillington, intersected at about halfway between the Dower House and the Manor the path he was pursuing. The objects in question were the figures of a man and woman standing in the middle of the public footway, which held a transverse course across the park, and just outside the shade of a copse.

There was no reason why the couple should{200} not be any pair of village lovers—of his own servants taking loitering farewell at the crossing of the ways. Yet Edward quickened his pace. The added proximity of fifty yards told him that the man’s figure was elderly and bulky, and that he was holding the wrists of his slender companion against her will. Both were talking with such vehemence and concentration of gesture as to be absolutely unconscious of anything outside themselves.

A horrible suspicion, with the strength of almost a certainty, first stopped the observer’s feet stock still, then fevered them into a run. At the same moment a little voyaging cloud, thick enough momentarily to hide her, wholly covered the moon, and when it had swept past the man had disappeared, and the girl was running away in the direction of the Manor, with all the fleetness of which a very light body and longish legs were capable.

In two minutes her pursuer had overtaken her. She stopped, panting, and said gaspingly—

“Oh, it is you! I am thankful to see you! I—I—have—had—such a fright!”

For once he could not doubt that she was speaking truth. Her eyes were full of terror, and her breath came in little dry sobs.

“I—I had taken Jock out for a run—you—you know how he teases one. By-the-by, where is he? He must have run after a rabbit.”

Alas! she was off the lines again. Her hearer knew perfectly that the innocent Jock had not{201} shared her mysterious evening promenade. His heart turned to stone against her, or at all events he thought so, and she had to continue her lame narrative unhelped by any expression of interest or belief in it.

“I had just reached that cross-path, when a man—you saw that a man was talking to me—jumped out of the trees. I had never seen him before, and—and—began to—to beg of me.”

She paused, her invention for the moment spent, apparently. It would be humane to give some sign of a pretence of credulity, but none came.

“I suppose,” she resumed with regathered pluck, though still trembling all over from the evidently very bad fright she had had, “that when he saw I had nothing to give—I told him I had no purse with me—he got angry, and——”

A voice at last broke in—an icy voice. Why should he allow her to sink deeper into her abyss of lies?

He saw a new and different fear born in her eyes; but in a second she was trying to conceal it.

“Was he—dressed like that? I was too frightened to notice! Was he—anybody that—that—you knew? that—that you recognized?”

The temptation to lead her into confession, by affecting to know more than he did, was strong; but he resisted.

“No!” he answered, and instantly saw a{202} light of relief spring into her eyes. “I could not see his face clearly enough for recognition; but,” he added, with stern gentleness, “I cannot believe that he was equally unknown to you!”

By this time she was recovering, and her weapons were getting into order again, the bodily terror that had for the moment floored her giving way to a moral fear.

“I cannot think why you are always so ready to distrust me!” she sighed. “What motive could I have for deceiving you?”

“I do not presume to judge of your motives,” he replied; “I go only upon facts.”

If she had not been very much flurried, she would have abstained from the question she now put.

“Since you force me into incivility,” he answered, with grave sadness, “I must remind you that ten days ago you told an elaborate falsehood, or rather series of falsehoods, to disguise the fact that you had spent the afternoon of my wife’s absence in London, in motoring to Tennington.”

Here was a facer. Yet it did not produce the effect he expected, and in an instant he realized that she had been aware of his knowledge all along.

“So that is why you have been so cruel to me all this weary time?” she cried, astute in softness, and trying with nice strategy to turn a position which it was quite impossible to face.{203}

A suspicious tendency to grow lenient, recognized in time and rebutted, hardened his voice.

“Why should I?”—her look taking a surprised unbraiding. “I meant no harm! I only did it because I was afraid of giving pain to either of you. I knew that you did not approve of Lady Tennington; and yet”—anxiously watching to see the good effect of the next utterance—“I could not bear to neglect an old friend who is down in the world.”

She had so deftly changed the ground of conflict, and confused the issues, that he could only repeat stupidly—

“Yes; isn’t she? Isn’t she very mal vue? And I am so down in the world myself, that it is not for me, of all people, to be hard on her!”

Perhaps the whole success of Miss Ransome’s not very artistic falsehoods lay in the poignant flashes of truth that she unintentionally lit up their darkness with, here and there. No hearer could doubt the reality of her desolate fellow-feeling for the social outcast with the golden wig, concerning whom Mr. Tancred had just been hearing something that made him feel that flaying alive would be too lenient a fate for her.

“It is no question of Lady Tennington,” he interrupted with a cold severity, “but of the person who left you so suddenly as soon as he saw me.”

“Did not I tell you—I thought I had—that he was a perfect stranger to me? that I{204} had never seen him before? He jumped out of the trees, as I was passing! Oh, how frightened I was!”

A perfectly unaffected shudder told the listener that here again was a stratum of unalloyed truth.

Had poor Miss Ransome remembered a certain fact, she would not here have lifted her clasped hands, nor would Edward have had the pain of seeing the glint of unfamiliar diamonds on one of them, showing her up by moonlight.

“Thank you so much! Of course I know that appearances are against me; and if, as you say, that man”—another shudder—“wore a fur coat, I suppose he could not have been a real beggar. But if you believe me——”

“Pardon me! my belief was limited to your being frightened! I can’t believe that the person to whom you were talking with so much animation and intimacy was a stranger to you, nor that you mistook him for a beggar.”

The gravity of his answer was tinged with such a disgusted reluctance, that Bonnybell’s heart, not really at all recovered from its late intensity of fear, stood still. Loathsome old Charlie! She had always known that he would be the death of her! Would it be better to tell the{205} truth now? No! the truth was always a mistake for people like her, who had to live by their wits. The truth was, like motors and tiaras, only for the well-off! But she must express some curiosity; put the question to which she already knew the answer so fatally well.

“I hardly like to insult you by saying so; but I believe the man to whom you were talking to have been Colonel Landon.”

Her answer came without apparent delay; yet three alternatives had raced through her head before she adopted it. “Shall I deny it flat? It is impossible that by this light he could have recognized him; he owned that he did not: it is just a trap to catch me! Shall I pretend never to have heard of Charlie? By this time Edward knows that I am not very innocent, so that will never do? Shall I just give a great start of indignation, and begin to walk home very fast?”

The last project was adopted, and at once put into execution. So well done was it, that it was a self-reproachful Edward, fearful of having done a grave wrong, who came up alongside of the fleeing victim to appearances.

The interrogation was so urgent, yet so apologetic, that somehow the bang-out lie that she had ready died on the fugitive’s lips. Perhaps the evasion to which she resorted was not much more really truthful.

“I do not know what I have done”—by this{206} time art had advised, and nature had readily supplied tears—“that you should accuse me of being friends with such a man”—“as Charlie” was on the edge of her lips; but the misleading diminutive was arrested just in time. “Of course, I do not know what he has done, but I know that everybody, except Flora, cuts him. How could you imagine that I could like such a detestable old beast, or want to meet him?”

In the application of the strong noun applied to Flora’s protégé there was such intense heartiness that Edward’s relief deepened.

“If I have been mistaken, how can I ever beg your pardon enough?” he said with a horrified accent of remorse, she posting along beside him, sobbing in the moonlight. “I must have been the victim of a preconceived idea and a fancied likeness. But I have just been hearing that that person had been staying for the last fortnight or more at Tennington; and I unhappily could not forget that you had been reduced to—to invention to hide the fact of your visit there.”

The links in the chain of evidence were closely knit. Yet there was hope as well as apology in his tone—hope of a denial as emphatic as her expression of distaste had been.

But Miss Ransome had already begun to repent of an outspokenness so foreign to her usual methods. “If Charlie ever heard that I called him a detestable old beast, it would be all up with me.”

They had by this time crossed the plank bridge that parted park from pleasure-grounds. The{207} sluggish river, by which her bored feet had so often stepped, gleamed beside the path ennobled by moonlight; and Bonnybell began to feel safer. In this extremely tight place she must invoke the subtlest diplomacy to her aid. The high line of injured innocence which a few minutes ago had seemed out of the question, now, thanks to Edward’s changed and humbled attitude, appeared more practicable than any other, and without delay she adopted it.

“It is the want of trust,” she sighed, her head bowed on her chest, and one brilliant tear deftly shaken off on to her muff—“the absolute want of trust, that is what does the mischief.”

To this question she found it not convenient to respond directly, but she resumed her melancholy rhetoric.

“It is the readiness to believe evil of one, to put the worst construction upon one’s words and actions, that takes the heart out of one’s efforts to do right.”

There was silence for a minute, while they still speeded homewards under the quiet trees that detached loose leaves to drop on their heads, and while a painful conflict raged in Edward’s mind. Was she speaking truth? It was just possible; as long as the music of her breaking voice was falling on his ear it was even probable.

“If I have wronged you by my accusation,” he said in a voice as unlike his usual air as her own, “I do not know any penance that I can do{208} heavy enough to wipe out the insult. If I have wronged you, can you ever forgive me?”

“As I hope to be forgiven!” she answered, lifting a little saintly wet face to heaven. It was a tag strayed out of some tale or rhyme which came blessedly to her aid at the moment she most needed it.

It was not till some time after he had left her, and the emotion caused by her angelic unresentingness had somewhat subsided, that Mr. Tancred remembered that his young guest had given him no explanation which could by any means be made to hold water of the equivocal situation in which he had found her.{209}

CHAPTER XIX

It was impossible that such an experience, or group of experiences, should not leave traces on the complexion; yet it had to be left to its fate, Camilla’s eye for paint being as the nose of the truffle dog for truffles. Nor, if the cause of her pallor were inquired into, would Miss Ransome have the harbour of invention to steer her dismasted vessel into. Invention, however harmless, had in her present circumstances, standing at the bar of Edward’s judgment, to be shunned like the plague. But Camilla’s questions were fortunately diverted to her husband rather than her guest.

A pause long enough for Bonnybell to say to herself that Edward had begun by jibbing at the attention to her foes alluded to.

“The result of a pneumonia blouse, I suppose! As long as girls strip themselves naked in January{210} they cannot be surprised at their chests and lungs resenting it.”

“The following such a fashion is the solitary lapse from common sense I have ever detected in Catherine.”

The amende was honourable, and in consonance, as Edward felt, with Camilla’s principles, and the line she had adopted with regard to the woman whom she contemplated as her probable successor.

The question was unlike Camilla, habitually severe upon gossip and incurious of her neighbours’ affairs. It was evidently born of that Sunday serenity of mind which made her wish to keep up the cheerful trickle of family talk which her own grim paucity of words and severity of aspect quenched.

Edward hesitated for a moment, and Bonnybell gasped. Too well was she acquainted with the piece of news communicated to Mr. Tancred by his friend with the cold in her head, or more probably by that mother whom she had before utilized as a cat’s-paw.

“News? Did they? Oh yes, by-the-by, they told me that Lady Tennington is leaving Tennington at once. She has had such heavy losses at bridge lately that she wants to let it on a long lease.”

That dry comment closed the subject, and dinner passed without any nearer approach to peril.{211}

But it was a wakeful Miss Ransome who surveyed that night, from a bed where sleep was for a long time not even sought, the dangers of the past and the perplexities of the future. Thankfulness, deep and pure, at the tidings conveyed at dinner by Edward took the first place. If Flora left the country, her abhorred guest would have no excuse remaining for frequenting it, since no other house in the neighbourhood was open to him; and not even for the pleasure of persecuting herself would Charlie face the discomforts of a country inn. What a dirty trick, and how like him, to have her shadowed! to waylay her as soon as he saw her alone and unprotected! to try to frighten her into unjustifiable promises of giving up what he knew would be the making of her, by threats and reminders! If she had been compelled to promise, if Edward had not appeared in the nick of time, much she would have kept to it! She laughed among her pillows. One advantage of her enemy’s disreputability was that, whatever he said no one would believe him! But if she had not been a fool she would have consented to the other man’s urgent entreaties to be allowed to escort her as far as the bridge, to see her safely inside the pleasure-grounds. In the dread of incurring one risk she had run head foremost into another and far more serious one. Though now safe as in the heart of a cloister, a shiver of disgusted fear at the remembrance of that hated rencounter ran over her.

Well, “All’s well that ends well.” Of course, it—the other thing—must come out now. She{212} would have preferred that the announcement, with its attendant clamour—she gave an anticipatory chuckle of enjoyment at the thought of the Dower House faces, as she had last seen them, sitting in awful judgment upon her—should have followed, instead of preceding, Charlie’s departure from the neighbourhood. But, of course, it must come out now. Edward had behaved well on the whole, but he had not pretended to believe her cock-and-bull story.

“If I had had time, I could have made up a better one. Time is everything,” she reflected regretfully. “Charlie said one true thing. I shall be bored to death! Bored will not be the word for it! And how I hate being kissed! If I could only persuade him that I am so excessively modest that I cannot bear it just yet! The diamonds! I wonder, are they really fine, or only the usual sort of thing? The stones in the ring were good, but they are frightfully set.” Here she fell asleep.

It was on her return next day from a perfectly legitimate and safe constitutional within the limits of the garden that Miss Ransome was met by the announcement that Mr. Tancred would be glad to speak to her in the library. With no preliminary preening of her feathers, she followed the servant’s lead. Her heart rather dumped down, not from fear of the unknown, since she knew pretty well what was coming, but from a failure of exhilaration at the prospect.

Edward was standing, his graceful height{213} seeming to be even better in keeping with the grave stateliness of the room, warmly red and brown with book-backs gently redolent of Russia leather, than usual, when contrasted with the rather fleshy and extremely agitated young man beside him.

“I have taken the liberty of sending for you,” Tancred said, addressing Bonnybell with a cold perfection of politeness, “because Mr. Aylmer tells me that you have authorized him to give me a piece of news about you.”

Miss Ransome’s only immediate answer was to direct her beautiful eyes successively towards the faces of the two men who confronted her. Happily the thought behind them could not be read upon those pupils: “If it must be, I wish it could have been the other one.”

“It has rather taken me by surprise, as I did not know that you were acquainted.”

The tone in which the implied reproach was conveyed was of the gentlest, yet it bent the head of one of the culprits in a not wholly calculated expression of shame on her breast. It drove the other into blurted speech.

“The fault was entirely mine. Our first meeting in the park was purely accidental, wasn’t it?”

“Purely,” replied she, still keeping her head down, and wondering whether, considering the very minute instructions as to the direction of her walks, instilled into her by him at Tennington, her suitor could possibly be such a fool as to believe what he said.{214}

“And after that—after that”—floundering a little, but still stout in defence of a cause of whose badness even he must be aware, “she was afraid of my people. No wonder, after the way they had treated her!”

At that she lifted an eye-beam of meek gratitude towards her advocate’s face, but it ended its journey on the other’s.

“If you had taken my wife and me into your confidence we might have helped you a little.”

Behind the perfect restraint and courtesy of his words, Bonnybell detected the profundity of his contempt for her methods. Had they been alone she would have tried to cajole him into a more lenient view of her, but the presence of that stodgy pillar of defence—beefy was, to speak truth, the epithet that his love internally applied to him—which would henceforth for ever be interposed between her and all assailants, kept her silent.

Edward had by this time turned away from her—she looked upon the action as typical—and was directing a grave question to the scarlet Toby.

“Why should I? I am absolutely independent of my father. I owe none of them anything after the way in which they behaved to her.”

The red god of war spoke through his sullen voice, and Miss Ransome saw and grasped her opportunity.

“Whatever else happens to me, do not let me be a cause of quarrel between you and yours,” she said angelically. “If I thought I was going{215} to be a firebrand I would run away and hide myself somewhere where no one would find me.”

Then she pulled herself up. “I must not be melodramatic, he would see through it in a moment.” The he did not refer to her future husband. Her inspiration took a wiser form. Going up to her fiancé, and laying her hand on his shoulder, she said with a calculated impulsiveness that had yet the curious one grain of truth in it which her lies, spoken and acted, so often held—

“Ask them just to tolerate me. I do not expect them to like me. Poor things, it would be too much to hope”—the corners of her mouth twitching with irresistible, if rather nervous, and happily not evident mirth at the picture that rose before her quick brain, of the imminent announcement and its effect—“but if they would give me just a chance! Every one has a right to ask to be given a chance.”

Of the two pairs of eyes towards which her own rolled in a lovely candour of appeal, one met her glance with a besotted ecstasy of approbation. The other pair fell. Oh, if she could only get Toby out of the room, out of the house! Her situation between the two men was fast becoming intolerable to her. If only Toby was out of sight and hearing, she could manage Edward so far better. And the contrast between their appearances was getting on her nerves.

“Go,” she said with a charming air of self-denying insistence, “go at once. I can’t bear you to delay a moment. Whatever they may{216} have done to me—and indeed, indeed you exaggerate—your first duty must always be to them.”

Metaphorically she pushed him out, entirely ignoring his distressed signals to her to accompany him to the hall door, on the very off-chance of snatching a moment of that privacy which was the last thing she desired. Her manœuvre did not at first seem to have achieved a particularly pleasant result.

“It was not Mr. Aylmer, I think, to whom you were talking in the park last night?”

A certain scorn in his eyes at once set her mind at rest on the point, and made her sharply repent of the tell-tale rush of her question.

“I thought I explained to you that I did not know. I took him for a tramp, but you said that he couldn’t be one, because he wore something—what was it?—that tramps do not wear. I suppose I was too frightened to notice. Anyhow, he was not anybody whom I had ever seen before.” She was lying with inartistic redundancy, and, she also felt, in vain.

“You must have lived with very credulous people,” he said slowly, the contempt in his tone veiled a little by courtesy, and tempered with pity, and so turned towards the door. She fled to intercept him.

He hesitated. What a walking lie she was! The black gown that she wore proclaimed an entirely non-existent grief. But, on the other hand, what a very, very juvenile offender she looked! Would it be indulging a culpable curiosity, would it be leading her into fresh falsehoods, to hear by what ingenuity she could gloss over and whiten her abominable behaviour? She saw the momentary weakness of doubt, and plunged.

“I had just lost Jock, and he helped me to find him. It was all en règle. He had been presented to me that day—at Tennington.”

Edward did not in the least believe in the accidental meeting, though he did believe that the direct and truthful Toby had been the dupe of its fortuitous character, but all he said was—

“Then—we met again—perhaps not quite so accidentally. I would not let him come here, as he wanted me. I knew that Mrs. Tancred would think it her duty—as, of course, it would have been—to warn Mrs. Aylmer, and the whole thing would have been blued!{218}”

There was a silence. He saw it all. For once she was speaking truth. The poor little waif, seeing the goal of toilettes, diamonds, automobiles ahead of her, and making for it, fighting with all her thief’s weapons of deceit and evasion to reach it before it was removed beyond her grasp. Her next sentence looked as if she had read a part of his thoughts.

“If I had been in any other position, the last thing I should have wished would be to marry. I think it a very repulsive institution.”

She said it with quiet conviction, and without the slightest suspicion of anything shocking, considering her present position, in the utterance. But it so completely tied her hearer’s tongue that she had to go on unhelped even by one of those half-doubtful yeses with which Edward had a trick of punctuating their talk.

“It was a far better provision than I had any right to expect, and it would free both of you from an incubus.”

The worldly wisdom of the first half of her sentence might have kept him still tongue-tied, but the uncertain voice and twitching lower lip that set off the last half drove him, as she knew it would, into speech. (“I must bring home to him what an orphan I am, but I must not cry yet.”) She winked away a real tear.

“Is it possible,” he said, holding back with difficulty, as she triumphantly and yet tremblingly saw, the expression of an emotion far deeper than she had any suspicion of having been able to evoke—“is it possible that you have run your head{219} into the noose because you have fancied yourself an unwelcome visitor here? How have we shown it? By what shameful lapse from courtesy and hospitality in us have you gathered such an idea?”

She put up her hands over her ears, hands whose affecting black Suèdeness gave no hint of Toby’s diamonds.

“I will not let you say such things!” she said with something nearing a little cry; “you who have been so astonishingly good to me. Even when you made me feel a little out in the cold of late, I know it was because you thought I deserved it; you did it for my good; but”—dropping her large white eyelids and making them quiver a little—“though I am not very clever, I could not suppose that you kept me here because I was a pleasure to you.”

Her words, though soft as a baby-zephyr in their gentle implication that his coldness, his Pharisaic want of charity in interpreting her, his inability to see things from her poor little point of view, had driven her to her present precipice seemed to hit him a blow full in the chest.

“If what you have done is owing to an extraordinary misapprehension,” he said in a penetrating low voice, “it is not yet too late to——”

But she did not let him finish his sentence, breaking in in real panic. “Good heavens! how I have overdone it! He is quite capable of sacking my Toby under the impression that he is delivering me.{220}”

“Oh, you mistake me,” she cried with a bewitching gesture of irritation at herself for having so ill conveyed her meaning. “Though I dislike the idea of marriage—I have seen such unhappy marriages—yet I am quite incapable of accepting him from mercenary motives; he is far too fine a character.”

Then Miss Ransome pulled up rather abruptly, conscious of having struck a false note. (“I am on the wrong tack again. Toby has no more a fine character than I have.”) She took up her parable in another key.

“He will be very kind to me, and he can make excellent settlements. His father’s property must come to him, as it is entailed, and he can make ducks-and-drakes of the estate he inherited from his cousin. He told me yesterday that it could all be settled on me and the younger children.”

Was she quite on the right tack, even now? Did she hear a low gasp from Edward at the revelation of the delicate choice of topics discussed between Miss Ransome and her lover? Probably not, or she would not have added the rider which presently followed, uttered with nonchalant matter-of-factness.

CHAPTER XX

After all, Edward was better than his word, doing what he had at first wisely declined to do, “breaking” the news to Camilla, and receiving on his own devoted head the first rush, the deadliest Levin bolts of the thunderstorm of her wrath. The skirt of the deluge was quite enough for poor Miss Ransome. The interview opened with an amenity which gave the keynote.

“Had a scullery-maid in my service,” Mrs. Tancred said, framing each word with such slow care, as if she feared even one of her pearls of speech should be lost—“had a scullery-maid in my service conducted her courtship in the way you have, I should have made my housekeeper dismiss her at once without a character.”

No etiquette book or guide to polite conversation having provided a suitable reply to such an address, Miss Ransome took it in acquiescent silence, not attempting to put up the umbrella of any useless palliative against the hurricane.

“It would be a mockery to hope that any blessing could attend a marriage resulting from an acquaintance so disgracefully made and scandalously cultivated. It is a gratifying reflection{222} for me that it is I who have brought such a calamity upon my friends! I pity them; I pity him, poor deluded fool, from the bottom of my heart.”

It was in vain for the young creature so agreeably apostrophized to hug her favourite maxim that “hard words break no bones.” It began at this point to escape from her rather convulsive embrace. Two salt drops hung unshed on the lengthy eyelashes—one of her most uncommon beauties—of her lower lids.

The lightning must have struck her that time. She felt as if she were black all down one side. The tears dried up on her lids.

“I had only just begun to lessen your and Mr. Tancred’s dislike for me,” she said, not as if in complaint, but with humble acquiescence in an accepted fact; “and now I have to face a whole hostile family, all of whom dislike and disapprove me more than even you can do!”

Nothing could be less civil than the “That would be difficult!” here interjected; but Miss Ransome had a closer acquaintance with her judge’s character than when once before she had stood a criminal at that judge’s awful bar, and an instinct telling her that the rudeness of the ejaculation possibly had its rise in the suspicion of a temptation to leniency under her own disarming oratory, encouraged her to proceed.{223}

“Don’t you think I am to be pitied for knowing that, if I were to search high and low, I could never in the whole length and breadth of the land find a family who would be ready to welcome me into it?”

The comment was even more stinging than its predecessor; yet Bonnybell’s fine ear detected a little uncertainty in its brutality.

“Yes,” she answered, with a little ring of miserable humiliation in her tone, “you are right. Wherever I go, I must force myself; nobody in their senses would hold open their arms to me.”

That night Miss Ransome begged to be excused from appearing at dinner, not unwilling that it should be known that her eyes were too extinguished with crying for her to be decently visible; and, as she reflected, “When you are in disgrace a consommé and the wing of a pheasant are better enjoyed beside your dressing-room fire than under the eyes of your exasperated patrons.”

The husband and wife faced each other in the gravity of their original tête-à-tête. Only such a thin rivulet of remarks irrigated the drought of their silence as saved them from provoking among their servants the comment that they must have had a “row.” Facing the Spartan abstinence of his companion, Edward was compelled to eat almost entirely alone, and even he{224} had to force an appetite. When the men had finally retired—

“I suppose that you were”—he paused to reject one adjective and pick another—“rather severe to her?”

“I told her that if a scullery-maid in my employment had behaved as she had done, I should have had her discharged on the spot without a character.”

To himself he said, “How inconceivably barbarous women are to one another!” and the thought was coupled with an ignoble wonder, which had often assailed him in the earlier days of their wedded life, as to whether there was any end at all to Camilla’s forehead, or whether it had really gone to look for the back of her head? But his voice was well under control before he asked—

“How did she take it?” repeated his wife, with a sombre wrath in her tone that testified to the intensity of the annoyance that the transaction discussed had caused her. “How does she always take slaps in the face? With turned-up eyes and turned-down mouth, and a Sainte Nitouche air that{225} would almost convince one in the teeth of one’s senses that she was the innocent lamb and one’s self the butcher.”

The question was inspired, not by the idle curiosity of which Edward had accused himself, but by the forlorn hope that, since she was presumably making a clean breast of it, Miss Ransome might have added to her confession an explanation of the still uncleared-up mystery of her meeting in the park with that other person, whose moonlit outline had worn such an ominous resemblance to Colonel Landon’s.

“Explanation! Not she; she was far too shrewd. No, her line was an appeal to the feelings. She addressed herself to the wrong quarter for that!”—with a short laugh of scorn.

Edward’s was naturally a questioning spirit, and he was still asking himself whether, after all, Miss Ransome’s guns had been so ill laid and pointed when Camilla spoke again.

“It is criminal to rejoice in one’s friends’ calamities, more especially when one has brought those calamities upon them; but, at least, we are the gainers.”

“We have learnt the mortifying lesson that no influences we can bring to bear have any power against hereditary depravity.”

“Depravity! That is scarcely the right word! There is no depravity in an engagement to{226} marry between two free people, however brought about.”

Engagements to marry had always been subjects for wincing to Camilla ever since her own, and the phrase “however brought about,” though uttered without the slightest arrière-pensée, was perhaps not happily chosen. She fell silent, and later in the evening, after a prolonged pause, evidently given to painful reflection, said—

“I thought I had never seen a path more plainly indicated to me as the right one, never taken a step more unmistakably under guidance; but I now see that I was misled by that exaggerated value for physical attractions which has led me into all the gravest errors of my life.”

Edward was no coxcomb; yet it was impossible to mistake what the gravest of the grave errors of her life had, in his wife’s opinion, been.

“You are coming to London with me?” asked her husband, looking up from his coffee.

The negative was naked, and did not seem to invite further questioning; but Mrs. Tancred presently volunteered the unasked information.

Neither of her auditors hazarded a comment, but the sinking heart of one of them inquired of itself, “Does she mean to take me with her?” There was a pause as of Nature between two thunderbolts.{227}

“I am going to ask pardon of my friends.” Edward was apparently run out of his stock of “yeses,” and the white face of the object of Camilla’s apologies dropped towards its heaving chest. The whiteness was partly artificial, due to an annoyed comment by the artist on her own carmines at an earlier period of the morning. (“I am incorrigibly rosy! One ought never to be pink at a crisis! I can do it so that even without her spectacles she will not be able to detect it!”) “And, moreover, I wish to find out what their attitude will be towards——”

She paused before the name of Bonnybell, as before an unclean word with which she was unwilling to sully her lips. The unclean word lifted up its little pitiful voice.

Instinct dictated to her the phrase in its undefended humility; and though the ungracious “It is no part of my mission to be your messenger!” could hardly be said to be encouraging, Miss Ransome felt that she had struck the right note. She was alone with Edward for one moment in the hall before his diurnal departure.

“How I wish you were back!” she cried in such a subdued plaint, as seemed forced out of her maiden reticence in spite of her.

“Do you?” He could only hope that the surprise he tried to throw into his words was more perceptible to her ear than the emotion that entered into them without any throwing.{228}

Mrs. Tancred’s absence was prolonged enough to give its cause ample time to consider her situation in every light and from every angle. The season of suspense was passed, like all ordinary mornings, in the schoolroom, but Miss Ransome gave herself a whole holiday in honour of her betrothal, and also because, as she sensibly reflected, an equipment of elegant learning would be wasted upon the mate of Toby.

“If they refuse to entertain the idea at all—and I am a pill for them”—she laughed maliciously—“and Camilla insists on my giving him up to oblige them, I suppose we shall have to be tied up at once in some hugger-mugger way at a Registry Office. Pah! how can any one marry who has any other means of subsistence? I may give up living by my wits, but I shall have Toby pour tout potage for all eternity!”

The thought was so unexhilarating that it stemmed the current of her ruminations for a time, while she dwelt upon it, her eyes resting on the trees which masked her windows, but through which, owing to the fall of their leaves, little loopholes into the beyond had become apparent.

“It is ridiculous—deadly dull as it has been—but I believe I shall be sorry to go. One cannot enjoy the old camel’s pummellings, but I do not dislike her as much as I ought, and{229} Edward, dear, courteous, hesitating, incredible Edward, who has never once tried to kiss me! Oh that I could say the same of Toby!”

The last and most grotesquely fervent of Miss Ransome’s aspirations was drowned in the sound of wheels, and all her being passed into her ears as she listened to hear her fate. She had not long to wait. Camilla herself—no messenger footman—opened the schoolroom door, and shut it carefully behind her.

“They will have nothing to say to me?” The just-enough-panted inquiry was accompanied with a little rush forward.

“They have no choice,” replied Camilla, dryly; “Toby is his own master.”

“I know that he is independent of his father in money matters,” rejoined Bonnybell, with an excursion into the realities of truth as injudicious as unusual, “but——”

“You would not have risked your patent-leather shoes in the park in pursuit of him if he had not been.”

“I was going to say that it was not the money question that I cared about. What I want to know is whether they can bring themselves—by-and-by—in time—to look upon me as a daughter and sister.”

“They will try.” The tone in which Mrs. Tancred uttered the sentence plainly showed what, in her opinion, the upshot of the effort would be.{230}

“And to show that they are in earnest and are willing to give you the chance you asked for, they have generously invited you to stay at the Dower House; I am to send you over this afternoon.”

Perhaps it was excess of joy at this news of her acceptance into the bosom of the Aylmer family that caused half a minute to elapse before Bonnybell was able to ejaculate, with quite the proper emphasis—

And after the matter-of-fact frankness of Camilla’s answer, “Nothing,” there was another pause.

“Will they”—there was nothing spurious this time about the quailing accent—“be very severe to me?”

“You must remember that it takes time for decent people to become acclimatized to your methods, but they will do their best.”

Miss Ransome’s heart—though, in its wrong, shifty way, not uncourageous—gave a dull thud of dismay. To accept with disarming humility the admission thus cordially offered, and go with smiling readiness to meet the buffets in store for her, was plainly the only wise course to pursue, and no one was better aware of it than herself. Yet at the awful ordeal ahead of her the flesh jibbed.{231}

The trenchant question could have but the same answer as Bonnybell’s own inquiry as to what she had done to deserve such goodness had elicited from Mrs. Tancred. After a moment the latter resumed—

“I cannot pretend to you that your visit will be a pleasant one, but, as I said, they will do their best.”

At the terrific view thus conjured up of Catherine and Miss Barnacre’s best, Bonnybell’s artifices fell away from her, and in a spasm of most real consternation she dropped down on her knees beside Camilla, in the attitude most reprobated by that lady, and cried out—

“Oh, I do not think I can bear it! They will put their fingers on all my weak spots, and I have so many—many!”

Mrs. Tancred’s answer was to twitch the gown clutched by the bride-elect’s convulsive fingers out of them, and say—

“That is true,” replied the other, sobbing; “but when you are down upon me I know that it is for my good. Unworthy and wretched as I am, I have always known that you did not really hate me, since that night when you came up to my bedroom and kissed me when you thought I was asleep.”

Bonnybell’s wet eyes were cast down, but she{232} heard her benefactress give a start at this masterly communication.

“It was of a piece with the rest of your conduct to pretend that you were asleep,” she said harshly.

CHAPTER XXI

A steady fine rain had set in, which had lasted with scarcely any daylight intermission, though, as often in wet weather, the nights were fine, since Bonnybell’s absorption into the bosom of her future family. Three days had passed since that event, and from inside the walls of her prison-house had come no sign of how things were going with her there. Sometimes Edward felt Darius’s wish to go to the edge of the lion’s den and cry out “in a lamentable voice” to a little modern Daniel to know how she was faring there. The only difference was that he did not indulge it.

Mr. Tancred had returned to find his guest already gone, and told himself at once that he was relieved. That there might be no mistake about it, he repeated the statement several times.

“She is absolutely indifferent to the young man,” Camilla said, using the generic term for humanity instead of the colloquial, on the same principle as she always spoke of Jock as “the dog” when he was in disgrace. “She went off in a flood of tears.”

“With such an ordeal before me, I think I should have done the same,” he answered.{234}

“I reminded her that she would have the support of her accomplice; but that did not seem to give her much confidence.”

For not the first time in his life Edward wished that his wife would give him a holiday from the dry irony whose use had become a second nature to her, but he did not, it is needless to say, tell her so, and Mrs. Tancred continued in the same strain—

“She repeated what a noble character he was; but said that in this case it was some woman-friend whom she needed to cling to. I was unable to advise her to cling to”—“Catherine Aylmer” was on her tongue, but she substituted—“the ladies of the Aylmer family in their present frame of mind.”

He gave a slight shudder, and glanced at the clock. It pointed to 10.30. For five mortal hours the lions had been crunching the tender bones of the little new Daniel.

“It seems,” continued his wife, “that she has always liked women better than men.” An arid little laugh showed how much credit Camilla attached to the statement. “I wonder, while she was about it, that she did not add that her mother had done the same.” After a pause, “She must indeed have been in sore need of some one to cling to, for she tried to cling to me!{235}”

There was an angry ring in the voice that uttered the last clause, which showed Mr. Tancred that his wife had not been so untouched by poor Miss Bonnybell’s frantic gymnastics as she wished it to be believed; and for the first time he felt less intolerably grated upon by her tone.

“Are you determined to make her always carry that unfortunate mother upon her back?” he asked, rather wearily. “The poor creature will have enough to do through life to get away from her without your help.”

“You are quite right. I do not think that the Aylmers will let her forget her parentage in a hurry.”

Three days had passed; and during them the married pair seemed to themselves to be always falling silent. A tacit convention prevented their perpetual discussion of one subject; yet none other seemed to present itself, and the eschewed theme kept cropping up continually, like gout weed in a garden. The house seemed to both extraordinarily silent. Their late guest had never been noisy, and it would have seemed impossible that the removal of so small and soundless a presence could have made any difference in a great house’s contribution to the noise of the world. Yet the absence of so—as one would have thought—imperceptible a footfall on the deep-carpeted stairs; the extinction of such tiny{236} trills of song and wafts of laughter made the rooms seem void, as if uninhabited, and hushed as if one lay dead in them. It was strange that this deliverance from a little adventuress, of whose existence they had six months earlier been ignorant, should have made the woman feel the bitter curse of her barrenness, and the man the contemptible vacuity of his self-murdered life more acutely than ever before.

It was under a variety of aspects that the subject reared its shunned head. Camilla was always the one to introduce and then curtly dismiss it.

“I imagine,” she said one evening, after having been observing for some moments the idle flutter and dip of the leaves of the book her husband was ostensibly reading, “that you are feeling as if all the little colour that was in them had been withdrawn from our somewhat grey lives; is it not so?”

There was no anger nor even surprise, only a sort of compassion in her tone, as of one gauging anew the drabness of an existence in which such an illumination could be felt as a loss.

“Are you judging me by yourself?” he asked, with a smile not more melancholy than, and as calmly kind as usual. “Are you sure that it is not you who are missing our patch of scarlet?”

“I should miss a blister when it was taken off,” she answered, and the subject dropped.{237}

It rose again, however, and yet again, impossible apparently quite to submerge. On the third evening it came up suddenly, emerging from silence in a fresh dress.

“It would be difficult to find a worse way for disposing of money,” Camilla said, her rather grating voice breaking on the absolute stillness of her surroundings—Jock never snored and Edward never cleared his throat—“but I suppose we must give her a trousseau.”

“It would be like you,” he answered, carefully dissociating himself, as he invariably did, from any share in her generosities.

She must have grown too much used to this habit of fifteen years to be annoyed by it; so perhaps it was some warmth in his acquiescence that ruffled her, or simply that her stock of amiability had run low, but her rejoinder was certainly not amiable.

Ten minutes more must have elapsed before Jock pricked his ears, the finer dog-sense out-running human hearing. Camilla looked with wondering tenderness at him over the pins on which her philanthropic sweater was growing into fleecy life.

Edward shook his head, and Jock jumped out of his basket and made for the door, which opened as he reached it to admit a figure racing in at the top of its speed.

Before the astounded couple realized its{238} presence, the figure whose flexibility of knee-joint had often been a trial to its female patron had flung itself in an attitude of prayer between them.

The ejaculated inquiry was Camilla’s. The same idea had occurred to Edward, yet his wife’s outspoken wording of it gave him a galvanic shock at her brutality.

The kneeling angel gave pause to the pants which were heaving her black chiffon breast, to gasp out, with a reproachful look from one to the other of her listeners—

The extreme improbability of this statement entirely “dumbed” that one of Miss Ransome’s hearers who was never much addicted to speech, but the other cried out in a key from which no great pains had been taken to extract the incredulity—

“I did not run away; I asked them to send me——” She made a dramatic pause. “I was going to say home.”

By this time the slender darkness had risen to its feet, and was drawing itself up, not without a touch of unfamiliar dignity.{239}

“When I found that they believed something that they had heard about me, I felt that I could not spend another night under the same roof with them.”

For a moment the vague “something” remained with no demand for an explanation of it, Edward’s silence being due to a dreadful suspicion that whatever the accusation that had been brought against Bonnybell it was in all probability true; Camilla’s to a fear of hearing a fact or facts about her protégée even more shocking than those that had already wounded her ears. But as a shrinking from the disagreeable was certainly no part of Mrs. Tancred’s character, she pulled herself together, and asked brusquely—

“True!” repeated the other in a heart-wrung voice. “Oh, if you, too, are going to believe it!” She threw her hands out before her with a gesture at once of finality and desperation.

“They received an anonymous letter about me. It came by this evening’s post.”

“It accused me”—there was worldly wisdom in bringing out the accusation with difficulty; but the difficulty was real too—“the writer said he thought that the man whom I was going to marry ought to know that he had seen me one night last year in Paris at M——’s.”

The confession seemed at first to fall flat; at{240} least, with regard to the person to whom it was directly addressed.

“M——’s!” replied Camilla, with the unconscious ease with which an innocent young girl might pronounce an improper word. “What is M——’s?”

Bonnybell’s distraught orbs rolled with involuntary confidence towards Edward.

“I suppose it is some very disreputable haunt of vice,” said Camilla; “but I am thankful to say I never heard of it.”

“It would be absolutely out of the question for any femme du monde to be seen there if she wished to keep a rag of character; and as to a jeune fille!”

The question was point-blank, as was the searching eye-beam that lit it, and Bonnybell felt that the answer must be to match.

“True!” she repeated, with an anguish of upbraiding in her voice. “Oh, I cannot have explained properly! How can you ask me? I know that poor Claire was not careful enough in the places she took me to; but M——’s! and I never went anywhere without her!”

If Mrs. Tancred here had to struggle with some difficulty in suppressing her opinions of the chaperonage thus waved in her face, she came off conqueror; and “poor Claire’s” laurels, and even the objectionable pet name itself, went unimpugned.{241}

“Not the slightest!”—with wounded emphasis. “How should I? I did not know”—with innocent sorrow—“that I had an enemy in the world.”

A diversion was here effected by the fact that Edward, usually so quiet and noiseless, by some awkward movement of his foot displaced one of the fire-irons, which fell rattling from its andiron on to the hearth, before which the master of the house was standing.

Bonnybell’s heart, though in a certain sense a stout one, sank. “He knows that it was Charlie!” she said internally. “I was afraid that he must connect the letter with that unlucky episode in the park! Well, since I have begun, I must go on—‘in for a penny, in for a pound;’ and, after all, it is nearly all truth that I am telling.”

“It came by the afternoon post,” she continued, confining the appealing tragedy of her eyes to her female auditor for the present, as being the easier field of action. “I saw at dinner-time that something must have happened, they were so cold to me; not”—in plaintive, though not accusatory parenthesis—“that they have ever been anything else. Miss Barnacre kept talking all the time about—adventuresses”—the speaker’s sunk voice made a slight shamed pause before the last word—“and Catherine was like ice!”

A long sighing breath bore on its wings this last cruel reminiscence; no other sound broke upon it, and it was with a heartened sense that the air was getting warmer that the narrator presently went on with her narrative.{242}

“Toby did all he could to prevent their showing it to me; he at least believed in me. I am afraid their doing it in spite of him will make a sad quarrel between them”—another sigh—“but they thought it right I should know; perhaps it was.”

“I suppose that they thought it their duty to give you an opportunity of clearing yourself,” Camilla said, in a voice whose chronic severity was tempered by some unusual relaxing of its harshness, “but for myself I should have put such a thing into the fire.”

“They gave it to me in the drawing-room after dinner. There were only Mrs. Aylmer, and Catherine, and Miss Barnacre there. I thought they need not have had Miss Barnacre; but you know how she always gives her opinion about everything, even about your religious views.” Bonnybell sank her voice at this last proof of the Barnacre’s presumption, and was rewarded by hearing a muffled snort of contempt from the direction of Mrs. Tancred. “I could not make anything of it at first, never having seen the handwriting before.” (O Bonnybell! why the inartistic superfluity of this touch?) “I asked what it meant.”

“When at last I made out what I was accused of, and saw that they—I am not quite sure about Mrs. Aylmer, but the other two did not even attempt any disguise—believed it, I—I did not say anything at all. I just gave them—gave{243} Catherine, I think it was, but I did not seem to see very well—gave Catherine back the letter and left the room.”

The foot of the figure on the hearthrug must have been on this particular night out of its owner’s control. A while ago it was the fire-irons that innocently suffered, now it was Jock; and, to his intense astonishment, nobody apologized.

“I knew that I should find Toby in the smoking-room, so I went there, and asked him to send to the stables and order something to take me—I am afraid I said,” with a humbly apologetic smile, “home!”

The wronger of Jock and of the fire-irons spoke at last, though his voice was not quite what he could have wished.

“He had no choice, poor fellow!” replied the girl, with an unpretending dignity which made it seem to her hearer as if he saw her for the first time. “He was in a dreadful state. I never saw any one in such a dreadful state; but I was firm. I said, ‘If it is true, I am not fit to be here; and if it is not true, I ought never to speak to them again.’”

“When I said that, oh, he was in a dreadful state!”—with a, for once, not manufactured shudder at the recollection. “He answered that, for his part, he had every intention of speaking to them again, and he did not think that they would forget what he meant to say in a hurry.{244}”

The narrative, pregnant though it was, had not taken long, and now it was ended.

But Bonnybell, contrary to the humble politeness of her wont, broke in with a little cry.

“True? Would it be much use my telling an untruth when ‘they’ are so close by to show me up if I did?”

The logic was as sound as the veracity of the appeal was obvious, and the little cry was, and did the work of, more than a rhetorical flourish.

“If, as I am induced to think, you have stated the facts as they occurred,” began Mrs. Tancred again, with no apparent resentment of the interruption, “I confess that I do not think there was any course open to you but the one you adopted. For once in your life you seem to have behaved with decency and dignity.”

The concession, though not very graciously worded, was an enormous one, and the relief consequent upon it proportionately great, for poor Miss Ransome had been very, very far from sure of her reception.

“Stay!” repeated her hostess, with an energy of scorn which warmed the inmost core of her silent husband’s heart towards her. “Do not ask preposterous questions.”

Thereupon the returned waif flung herself incontinently upon the rigid neck whose stiff ruffles and frills no fond daughter-arms had ever disarranged. The action bulked colossal to the{245} executor of it in retrospect. “How could I have done it?” she asked herself in a cooler after-hour, looking back upon her feat as the man who in youth has mounted a cannon-swept, bayonet-bristling breach into a burning town may regard the feat from the armchair of placid old age. Of course, I had had a good deal to upset me, but I must have been off my head.

The embrace, if so one-sided a transaction could merit the name, did not last long. Bonnybell was curtly told to sit down and not make a fool of herself, and Camilla began almost at once to scold her; but yet it was with a sense of extreme well-being that the little gutter-snipe, as in frank soliloquy she often called herself, settled her lithe body into a familiar armchair. Edward had sat down too, and Jock, making up his mind that reparation for his wrongs was unaccountably not forthcoming to-night, stepped into his basket, which stood raised on its accustomed tripod to keep him from imaginary draughts. The girl might never have been away. Yet to herself what odious æons seemed to have rolled between her last and her present occupancy of the Hepplethwaite chair that now held her!

To a casual observer all would have seemed as before, but a nicer eye would have detected that Mrs. Tancred had not resumed her labours on the nightly sweater. She sat looking straight before her with knit brows for some good while before she at last opened her mouth to utter slow and evidently well-weighed words.

“If you have told me the truth”—oh, why{246} that cruel preamble?—“I think, as I have already said, that your course was the abstractly right one. Worldly wisdom would, of course, have dictated a more conciliatory line of action. To be on terms of open hostility with your husband’s family will not conduce to the happiness of your married life.”

At the beginning of this harangue Bonnybell had sat straight up in her chair to mark her respect by an attitude of close attention. Her hands now clutched the arms till her knuckle-bones stood out through the white skin.

“But I shall not have any married life,” she sighed in a trembling tone that yet seemed to mean what it said.

“Not have any married life!” repeated Mrs. Tancred, with such an accent as made Miss Ransome wonder whether the words could indeed be her own. “I am quite at a loss. I thought I understood you to say that your fiancé” (never since his clandestine courtship had the young man been Toby)—“that your fiancé did not share his family’s suspicions?”

“He does not, he does not!” cried Bonnybell, in a sort of half-real, half-bogus rapture. “He is absolutely stanch. He would marry me to-night if he could. Oh, it is something to have one person believe in you like that; but it is I who, after what has happened, will not marry him.{247}”

CHAPTER XXII

The hour was late before the junta that sat upon Miss Ransome’s affairs of the heart separated for the night.

“Not marry him,” Camilla had repeated, with a terrible trenchancy, “after all that has happened—after the way in which you pursued him?”

Miss Ransome waived, with wise magnanimity, discussion of the unflattering phrase.

“It is for his sake,” she said, in sweet renunciation. “There can be no happiness in married life without confidence, as you have often told me, and since I seem to have enemies who stab me in the dark, this thing may happen again; and though he does not believe now, he may gradually grow to suspect that there may be something in it, and his people will work upon him till they persuade him that I am—what they think me.”

Her voice was broken, and her air so much that of the widowed dove, that it took her hearers a minute or two to disentangle the cool common sense of her utterances from its emotional fringes and tags.

“You seem to be ready to give up rather{248} easily what you stuck at nothing to secure,” Camilla said, in a voice of vexed puzzledom; and Edward’s voice raised itself for almost the first time in one of those tentative utterances that always gave the impression of his thinking everybody’s opinion more valuable than his own—

Miss Ransome turned on this diffident new interlocutor eyes glorified by a lofty self-abnegation.

“I have known more unlikely things than that happen,” Camilla said caustically, “and there is more sense and rationality in what you say than what I have hitherto thought you capable of; but still, if you are sincerely attached to the man—and I suppose that, after having sacrificed so much in the way of delicacy to gain his affections, you must at least be fond of him?”

She paused, leaving her sentence unbalanced, with an evident intention of obtaining an answer to its first half before proceeding to the second.

Bonnybell hesitated a moment. Even if she had been enamoured of her Toby, she would have much preferred not to say so before Edward, and things being as they were—— However, she got out of the dilemma fairly well.

Camilla received this graceful parry with a puzzled “Humph!” adding presently{249}—

“It does not seem to strike you that there is an injustice in punishing the man for what he has not done.”

“Punishing him!” repeated Miss Ransome, in a tone of startled anguish. “Oh no, I am only giving him a little pain now, to save him a great deal of pain later.”

The baffled keenness on Camilla’s face grew more acute, and its young object was also made aware by some sixth sense that Edward’s acumen was also at fault through this new double in a course that had never run particularly straight.

“You must have had an uncommonly unpleasant three days,” Mrs. Tancred remarked, after a ruminating space, “to be so anxious to loose what before you were so determined to grasp.”

Bonnybell could have spared these repeated allusions to the methods by which her conquest had been achieved, but she took it beautifully, and with gentle head drooped.

“That is true. Whatever happens to me in the future, I do not think I can well have a bitterer cup to drink than what they have held to my lips for the last three days.”

A caught breath in one direction and a fidgeted foot in another here assured Miss Ransome that her simple oratory had told, and she hastened to go on striking while the iron was hot.

“It was not only this last blow,” she said, with a long shuddering sigh, “but all along they took pleasure in humiliating me, in showing{250} up my ignorance and my foolishness—Heaven knows it was easy enough—and they were glad and ready to believe evil—even such unbelievable evil as this—of me!”

A mental gloss followed this last statement. “I am speaking truth, in a way; it is unbelievable that any mother could have taken her daughter to M——’s; and even poor Claire would not have done it if she had not been even less herself than usual that night.”

A distinctly emotional pause ensued, which Camilla, with a movement of the shoulders as of one shaking off an unwelcome burden, broke.

“Come,” she said brusquely, “this will not do. You must not try to work upon our feelings. For once in your life you have been the aggrieved person. I own that I cannot myself comprehend”—drawing up her bony figure with a scornful dignity that for once made it seem beautiful in Bonnybell’s eyes—“stooping to notice any accusation that took so low a form as an anonymous letter; but we must not allow ourselves to be led away into an exaggeration of feeling. After all, the whole thing rests upon a misconception. They are good and conscientious people.” (Miss Ransome was glad to verify that to make this admission cost Camilla what is vulgarly called a “swallow.”) “When your innocence is proved, they will be the first to own themselves in the wrong.”

“How can it be proved?” answered Bonnybell, dejectedly. “How can any one rebut a charge that comes one does not know whence,{251} and one does not know why?” The falsehood came more easily this time, but prudence and something, too, of authentic feeling bid it not stand alone. “I would not thank them for believing in me when my innocence was proved. The people I love and bless are those who believe in me first, and do without proof.”

The description, though perhaps not quite accurately fitting her present audience, was obviously meant to cover them, and it was not very harshly that Camilla repressed this new excursion into the realms of the emotional.

“If it is false,” she said, not unkindly, though without any direct acknowledgment of Bonnybell’s magnificent compliment to her own and her husband’s credulity, “you have only to wait, and it will die of itself. It is the essence of the false to perish.” (“That is a bad look-out for me,” thought Bonnybell, humorously, but she only bowed her head.) “The very monstrousness of the accusation”—indignation gave an unwonted quiver to the speaker’s voice—“will kill it the more quickly, and even if it takes time, you can well afford to wait. A year, two years, might make you a little less grossly unfit for the duties of a wife and mother than you are now.”

Again Bonnybell bowed her head, and across Edward’s memory there flashed in ludicrous incongruity the recollection of Miss Ransome’s views on maternity, as slightly but graphically sketched for his own benefit a few days earlier.

“I have always heard that there is nothing so wearing as a long engagement,” suggested Miss{252} Ransome, presently, with much hesitancy—“nor so ruinous to the appearance,” she was about to add, but thought better of it.

The severity, singularly absent from her latest utterance, here showed signs of returning to Camilla’s eye and tone.

“I do not quite understand the drift of your remark. You cannot be suggesting the advisability of thrusting yourself into a family which would receive you in the spirit that characterizes the Aylmers’ present attitude towards you.”

“No,” replied Bonnybell, with a little heartbroken gesture of renunciation. “I meant that there is nothing for me but to give him up.”

She held to the same text through the hour and a half during which the debate lasted, although listening with the most attentive and sorrowing mildness to all the arguments that could be adduced on the other side.

Arrived at the haven of her own room, she cast herself on the bed, and kissed it hysterically. “Was ever any one so glad to be back anywhere as I am to be here?” she sighed out. “Oh, what a three days! Did ever any one before go through three such days? I thought at the beginning of them that I had as tough a hide as most people. But oh, in five minutes they were through it. Barnacre, Catherine, shall I ever get their needles out of my skin?”

She turned over on her face for a moment or two to bury the memory of those poisoned pricks in the soothing softness of that hospitable pillow, then sat up on the edge of the bed, with her legs{253} dangling, while her reflections took a less painful turn. “I suppose there is some truth in what poor Claire used to say, that all respectable women are ill-natured.”

She ruminated awhile upon this wise, witty, and tender saying of her departed parent. Then her thoughts returned to fact, from their excursion into theory. “And to think that Charlie should have turned out a blessing in disguise! Without the help of his blackguardly letter—what an unspeakable sweep he is—how could I ever have got out of the impasse? Toby would never have let me go. Even now I should not be surprised at his putting a bullet into me to-morrow, as one is always seeing in the papers that grooms do to faithless kitchen-maids, when I give him his final congé. Well, that would be the end, and the dear old camel and Edward would be rid of their incubus. Poor Toby! How sea-sick the mere thought of him makes me! How very sincerely I dislike men!”

By this time she had jumped down from the bed and strolled to the cheval-glass. “I ought to do better—much better—than Toby,” she said, appraising her reflection. “Of course, the last three days have ravaged me and added five years to my age, but that is only temporary. I shall probably go on improving up to twenty-five, and Toby has so very much less in his power to settle than I at first understood, and he unwisely let me see that he meant to keep me ten months of the year in the country. I am sorry to play into the{254} hands of that detestable Barnacre, but it is really all for the best.”

With this piously optimistic reflection on her lips, she fell sweetly asleep. It was not the winter dawn, nor the voice of the tea-bearing housemaid, that awoke her. The electric light full on her eyes, shot her back from the land where all things are forgotten, into a consciousness that was at first but semi. Some one was standing over her, and a voice was in her ears, uttering sounds which presently resolved themselves into words.

“You need not pretend to be asleep; I was taken in once, but it is useless to try and deceive me a second time.”

Bonnybell sat up, hazily blinking, still only half outside the gateway of sleep, and gradually realized that the form towering above her in the grimness of its snuff-coloured toga, and the inexorability of its dragged-back grey hair, was no other than Camilla.

“Is there anything wrong?” she asked, rubbing her sleepy eyes with her knuckles—a delicious gesture for once perfectly natural. “Is it a fire, or burglars, or what?” The empire of slumber was still too strong for there to be anything but misty indifference to the calamities suggested in the speaker’s tone. Then, with a spring back into full consciousness, and a frightened opening wide of the startled eyes, “Toby cannot have come already?”

“My conscience would not let me rest,” replied Mrs. Tancred, with a ruthless lack of{255} apology for her intrusion, and a still incomplete belief in the genuineness of the drowsiness so ably presented. “Reflecting afterwards on the lightness with which you spoke of ‘throwing over’ and ‘giving up’ what you had sacrificed so much to win, I felt you could not realize that you were sacrificing what may never be offered to you again, the disinterested, protecting, shared devotion of an honourable English gentleman. To love and be loved worthily, perfectly—the most aspiring of us cannot hope to get nearer heaven on this side the grave than this!”

Camilla spoke the last sentence more as if to herself than to her auditor, and left the room immediately afterwards, as if ashamed. The dignity and solemnity of her utterance dispersed the ridicule attendant on such a Priestess of Eros, even in the trivial and hopelessly flippant mind of Bonnybell, and converted her mirth into a more human compassion.

“Poor dear old woman! I wish Edward could bring himself to be a little more demonstrative to her; but it would never do to give him a hint. So I am never to have another Toby! Well”—chuckling and yet shuddering too—“that is a deprivation I can well bear.{256}”

CHAPTER XXIII

The morning had come, and with it Toby. As Bonnybell, propitiatingly punctual, appeared at the exactly nine-o’clock breakfast-table, she was informed by the butler, whose tone—the really perfectly colourless one of a well-trained servant—seemed to her ear vibrating with the compassion which all creation must feel for her, that Mr. Aylmer had been waiting for an hour and a half in the morning-room, and would be glad to speak to her as soon as she was at liberty.

“An extremely bad habit, and a very good thing that he should be broken of it,” answered Camilla, unable, even at so dramatic a moment, to refrain from lifting up her voice in testimony against the vicious indulgence alluded to; but her hand rattled the cups of tea which, in contempt of servants and sideboards, she always made herself.

“I suppose I ought not to keep him waiting any longer,” said Bonnybell, turning with{257} extreme reluctance from the tempting, gleaming table, with its beautiful old green dragon china and its Queen Anne silver, towards the door of doom.

“You had better have a cup of coffee and something to eat first,” Camilla said peremptorily. “A painful scene should never be faced upon an empty stomach.”

The homely common sense of the advice came to the aid of its imperativeness, and Bonnybell eagerly drank the offered coffee, and with some difficulty swallowed a scrap of toast. But still she lingered. The entrance of a servant with a lengthy message for Mrs. Tancred gave the girl the opportunity for a word with Edward, who had not yet sat down to the table.

“You would not come too, I suppose, to back me up?” she asked with low precipitation, casting a glance out of the corner of her eyes towards Camilla. But her alarm in that direction was unnecessary, as it was one of the rules of Mrs. Tancred’s life always to give her whole attention to the subject that at the moment engaged her; and though her interest in Miss Ransome’s love affair was undoubtedly keener than that she felt for the third housemaid’s quinsy, the latter, while she was being informed of it, entirely swept the former from her attention.

At the strange request made him, Edward’s features took on an expression which the petitioner at once recognized as not one of acquiescence.

“Very well,” she rejoined, with a hysteric laugh, and half holding out a hand. “Good-bye, if you never see me again.”

“I mean that when a person is in the state of mind he is, poor fellow, one does not know what may happen.”

Her face was white as a magnolia, and yet contradictorily lovelier for the very absence of those reds which had seemed, when present, to make up half its beauty, and her eyes were full of a valedictory solemnity; facts of which, for once, she was all but quite unconscious.

“Do you mean to say that you are afraid of his being personally violent; if so——”

To her disordered fancy there sounded an echo of contempt in the form of the question.

“I am not much apt to be afraid,” she answered quietly, and a something in her tiny face, for all its blanching, confirmed the assertion. “I do not much mind if he does shoot me. What have I to lose now?”

There was a horrified astonishment in his tone, as if remorseful for some former incredulity, and for once Nature was too strong for Bonnybell. She saw in the mirror of Edward’s face that there must be a scornful denial of his accusation on her own. But in a flash she had again taken hold of herself and of her part. Not for a second must she forget, or let others forget, that she was broken-hearted at the loss of Toby.

“It would be a solution; and—and—it is{259} not easy to have two people to fight, myself as well as him! Wish me well through it!” She was gone.

The engagement had lasted three hours, so the clock told the watchers, who—not together, for Camilla had rigorously forced herself to her daily desk—were awaiting the issue of the duel.

“I am glad that you let yourself be persuaded by me not to go to London to-day,” Edward’s wife had said to him before withdrawing.

“In the case of two such perfectly undisciplined natures one never knows what developments may arise,” she rejoined.

With this imperfect consolation for his wasted morning, she left him. Since then, against his will, chidden by his common sense—for was not the smoking-room that held his uneasy idleness miles away from the morning-room?—he had been listening, asking himself whether, although unquestionably out of reach of any ordinary sound, the noise of—say a pistol or revolver shot might not penetrate to his straining ears? In vain to argue down the ludicrous idea. Did the danger seem real to her, or was the suggestion only thrown out to give herself a heightened interest in his eyes? She was quite capable of it. Not frightened either. Seldom as—he now realized—she spoke truth, she had spoken it then. Blanched with excitement, not fear.{260}

Had Mr. Tancred’s eye been able to verify or correct the notions upon the current melodrama presented by his imagination, he would have seen the object of his speculations in even sorer straits than he had pictured her. The end of those dire hours left her and her antagonist exactly where it found them. From the engulfment of the initial embrace her spirit had cried out to itself, “This is exceedingly disagreeable, but I suppose it will end some time. How glad I am that I drank dear Camilla’s coffee! I do not think I could have gone through with it if I had not! His tears are taking all the curl out of my fringe. Poor devil, if he only knew how little worth while it all is!”

The same inward ejaculations were pouring themselves forth in her inmost soul at the end of the three hours, when her situation was no further amended than that she was sitting on a chair—a simulated swoon had gained her this concession—with Toby kneeling before her, his uninvited head rolling about upon her knees—while between loud sobs he formulated, with the iteration of a jay or a pie, his simple thesis: “You said you loved me! You promised to marry me! I have done nothing to make you change your mind! You cannot, and shall not chuck me.”

Against the rock of this unanswerable logic her rhetoric had for one hundred and eighty minutes broken in vain. There was not a single weapon in her not ill-furnished armoury that she had not employed; and all with a like result.{261} “Wounded honour?” His family en bloc or severally should follow her round the room on their knees, imploring her pardon, and eating their words. “Tears?” He beat her hollow at them. “A vow never to love any one else?” This in her present nausea of endearments seemed a vow easy indeed to keep, but it was received with frenzy at the mere suggestion of such a possibility. The offer to be a sister to him and to be god-daughter to his eldest child when he was happily married to some one else were not up to her usual level of cleverness, and would not have been put forward had her mind been in its normal condition. Their effect was terrifying!

Physically exhausted, she leaned back in her chair, quite at her wits’ end, mechanically stroking with some dim hope of keeping it quiet the distraught head which, rolling about in sandy abandonment on her lap, pinned her to her seat. Never did a more poignant regret at the success of its own handiwork fill a human mind. “I ought to have known more about him before I went in for him so thoroughly, but who would have guessed that under that stodgy outside there was anything like this?”

Another hour had passed, and yet another, and still the situation remained at the same hopeless deadlock. Occasionally the head lifted itself and the mouth repeated its pitiful parrot cry, and once, twice, thrice again, Miss Ransome went through the weapons of her armoury. In her desperation she tried a new one; offered—in utter hopelessness of ever ridding herself of him on{262} cheaper terms—a compromise. If he would go away for a year, round the world—every one went round the world nowadays—in a year she might be cleared and made more worthy of him; and at the end——

He interrupted her with the brutal directness of one who had got through the civilized surface of things to the bed-rock of mere Nature, while a sort of cunning flashed into his dimmed and bloodshot eyes.

“That you undoubtedly would not!” was the reply made by herself to herself, but for him there was a little tired sigh, and an “Ah! if you cannot trust me——”

At that he went off into extravagances, incoherent assertions of the impossibility of any one seeing without longing to possess her; of the madness of leaving her as a mark for other men’s desires.

She collapsed into silence. “Will no one ever arrive to rescue me?” The answer seemed to come in a loud whirring familiar sound, the prosaic boom of the gong.

“They are very particular, very strict about hours,” she answered, casting wildly about for the rope that even now seemed to dangle just out of her reach, “and—and—dreadful, agonizing as it is to part thus, I must not—now of all times—do anything to alienate my only friends.{263}”

He had lifted his head to make his protest, and she had nimbly taken advantage of the fact to slide eel-like away from him, and make for the door. He was there before her. But just as he reached it the mahogany portal swung open, and in the aperture stood a tranquil black form.

“If you please, sir, Mrs. Tancred wished me to say that she hoped you would stay to luncheon.”

There was a moment’s pause while the full bathos of the situation made itself felt. Then civilization resumed her sway, the primæval instincts retired into the background, and the unfortunate Toby, averting his hideously disfigured face, and swallowing his last sob, answered thickly—

CHAPTER XXIV

“She would, I should think, be glad if you let her have luncheon sent up to her.”

“I have no opinion of food eaten in bedrooms. If people are well enough to eat, they are well enough to come downstairs; but she is probably not fit to be seen, so for once I will relax my rule.”

These two remarks, to which it would be superfluous to assign their respective ownerships, were all the comment upon the recent melodrama at first possible to the reluctant managers upon whose stage it had been played. They ate their luncheon in ruffled silence.

The revolt in Camilla’s Puritan soul against the orgy of ungoverned passion which had chosen her house for its scene was incongruously mixed with an angry compassion, which suspected itself of being something even more lenient towards the cause of the whole uproar, while a very sincere annoyance at the unavoidable and imminent split between herself and her nearest and most congenial neighbours threw in its pinch of bitterness to the distasteful brew.

Edward’s feelings on the subject were even{265} more complicated and less agreeable. Vexation at his own folly in allowing himself to be persuaded to forego his day’s work on the chance of a needless intervention in what no wise concerned him, a compassion even keener than his wife’s, but in his case dedicated chiefly to Toby, coupled with a dim but still existing satisfaction in his discomfiture, and that again with a biting self-disgust for being capable of such a sensation,—these ingredients composed no pleasant potion.

“It is to be hoped that, at all events, this will end the affair,” Camilla said, when at length they were alone, with a sigh of stretched endurance.

“Does it?” she rejoined, her nervous irritation wreaking itself, as it had so often done before in their married life, in causelessly stinging words upon him. “I dare say you know more about these kind of extravagant love scenes than I do. You certainly cannot know less.”

He smiled a little sadly. “Mine was a very simple deduction; if she had relented, Toby would not have foregone his luncheon.”

“That is true,” she said, mollified by his gentleness, a gentleness that yet never prevented the recurrence of her stings, “and I was unnecessarily snappish, as you must often find me. Poor little wretch! She has shown more principle and grit than I gave her credit for, if she has kept to her renunciation of him.”

Edward was silent. The having lived in the house with Bonnybell for several weeks had{266} possibly made him more attached to rigid truth than ever before; and the motive of her heroic abandonment was still too obscure to him for him to be able to join as cordially as he would have liked in encomiums of it.

“It is, of course, a severe trial to have her returned upon our hands, when we had thought our responsibility nearly ended; but we must try not to let her see it—a needless caution to you, whose tendency is always towards over-indulgence—but in this case I should be in agreement with you; in a mind like hers, the first germs of good cannot be too carefully fostered.”

Edward’s acquiescence in this plan of campaign, though really a fervent one, was indicated only by a slight nod, and Mrs. Tancred went on, the leniency and forbearance of her first proposal sliding into a withering sarcasm.

“Our friendship with the Aylmers is, of course, at an end; and doubtless this is only the beginning. An easy calculation will tell us how soon we shall be deprived of all acquaintances who number an unmarried male member among their family; perhaps”—the edge of her weapon growing keener, and fancy taking a bitter flight—“perhaps, indeed, the limitation to un-married male members is superfluous!”

Was it a happy moment for the object of this philippic to appear in person to answer it? Happy or unhappy, there she was. Scarcely had the climax of her forebodings as to the ultimate result of her hospitality passed Camilla’s lips when Bonnybell stood before her. But what a{267} Bonnybell! What a blurred, dimmed, dishevelled, altogether lamentable Bonnybell! A drowned toy terrier is the only image that for wretchedness, smallness, dilapidation, and pathos, could at all convey the idea of the figure that now presented itself to its protectors.

“I do not want any luncheon,” the dim ghost said in a voice that matched its face, “and I know that you do not approve of people eating things in their rooms; but thank you so much, all the same, for thinking of it! Oh, if I once begin to thank you, when shall I stop?” She ended with a low wail.

“Don’t be hysterical,” replied Camilla, hastily. “Edward, go and fetch her a glass of port wine and a biscuit. The servants must not see her. There, lie down and go to sleep. What is the use of crying yourself into a jelly just because for once in your life you have behaved properly?”

Edward departed on his errand with the greatest alacrity, glad to escape from the horrible yearning of angry pity that the sight of Bonnybell in her distorted misery inspired him with, and from the grating severity of his wife’s voice. Yet he took with him a feeling more subtly unpleasant than those from which he fled—the suspicion, namely, that the very abandonment of Miss Ransome’s woe was in itself partly a pose. “She might have washed her face and combed her hair,” he said to himself wrathfully; but the wrath, if not quite the suspicion, died down, swallowed in an immense pity as her trembling hand took the offered glass from his, and her sunk and diminished{268} eyes lifted themselves in mute gratitude. “Poor little soul! It can be no parti pris that has dwindled her to half her size; and even if she has tried to make a bid for the compassion of the only friends left to her in the world by intentional accentuation of a forlornness real enough in all conscience without accenting, isn’t she even for that poor deceit the more an object of the profoundest, most lenient sympathy?”

By this time Love’s victim had been ordered to a sofa; and Camilla’s knuckly hands were arranging a crocheted shawl of their own manufacture over the little shivering body with an air of protest that was yet not ungentle.

“You may go now,” she said, addressing her husband brusquely in a key that, though also protesting, yet seemed to convey the impression that her unwonted occupation was not altogether disagreeable to her; “there is nothing to make a fuss about. She will have quite recovered from this silly lapse from self-control by teatime.”

This, as it turned out, was a slight over-statement of Miss Ransome’s powers of recuperation, and when Edward forced himself to reappear at five o’clock, mastering a strong spasm of æsthetic dread at the expected sight of the miserable little object that he had carried on the retina of his eyes throughout his ride, he found, to his relief, that she had asked leave to retire to bed.

“Would it be wise to send for the doctor?” Edward asked rather futilely, and received the withering response he deserved.{269}

“The doctor? Why, Hutton would laugh in my face. She is simply sharing the necessity, common to us all, of enduring the consequences of her own actions. If she will lash up men by illicit means into the state to which she has reduced this headstrong and rather brainless young man, she must not complain of the result. One can only hope that it will be a lesson to her not to repeat the achievement. From what I can gather, I do not think that she had a very agreeable forenoon.”

The marks of the forenoon alluded to were still plainly visible on Miss Ransome’s face when, punctual to the moment, she placed herself next morning at the breakfast-table. Her eyes were still reduced to half their size, and the reds still absent from her cheek. She had regarded her own countenance in the glass before coming down to breakfast, with an artist’s regret at the prohibition laid on her by prudence to throw in the little repairs and improvements which might have been easily effected in the mirror before her. “I begin to be afraid,” she said to herself, thoughtfully, “that I shall ‘go off’ sooner than I expected. I depend very much upon colour, but it would be madness to touch up. I must try and keep pale, without whitening, for at least a week. I wonder when my spirits may begin to improve after such a blow?”

She chuckled a little, but not very heartily. “It has shaken me a good deal, all the same. Poor devil, I wonder how he is feeling this{270} morning! I would give a good deal—a safe offer, as I do not possess a sixpence—that I had let him alone. But how is one to tell? He looked so stodgy.”

With a sigh of real regret for the accomplished mischief, she went downstairs with the springless step that her really shaken nerves and the maintenance of her supposed condition of spirits dictated. A fresh blow awaited her.

“I am afraid that you are not yet at the end of your difficulties,” Camilla said, and the rigidity of her tone revealed that some unpleasant new development of the situation had shown itself.

Miss Ransome gave a gasp. She had come down thinking that a little chastened demonstrativeness towards her benefactress might not, under the circumstances, come amiss, but Camilla’s tone froze the little rill of gush at its source.

“He has not come back?” The words would scarcely form themselves for the terror behind them.

The question was ignored, and Camilla, faithful to her principle of never blinking, veiling, or delaying the conveyance of bad news to its lawful owner, explained her announcement of yet unaccomplished calamity.

“Mrs. Aylmer has written to announce that she and her eldest daughter propose to be here at eleven o’clock this morning, for the purpose of begging you to reconsider your decision.”

The carefully matter-of-fact key in which this fact was delivered did not disguise from Bonnybell the profound annoyance underlying it. Her{271} own stupefaction at it was so great as to restore her wholly to Nature.

“And is Miss Barnacre coming too?” was all that her white lips could stammer. A reassuring snort from Camilla—the war-horse snort which the name of the too progressive governess always evoked—reassured Bonnybell on this head, and she was presently able to add, “He has made them do it.”

“So Mrs. Aylmer says,” referring to a letter lying open before her, and relentlessly reading aloud the sentence alluded to. “I cannot, cannot lose my boy—my only boy! And the state he is in gives us well-founded fears for his life or reason.”

A flash of wondering contempt for a life so lightly forfeited and a reason so easily upset, darted across Bonnybell’s brain; but it is needless to say that no hint of such a feeling was to be read on her tiny woe-wrung visage.

“What is the use of their coming?” continued the young creature, still with that moaning intonation, but gathering her wits about her, and seasoning pathos with common sense. “What is the use of my seeing them? Nothing is changed. It cannot be that in so short a time they have found out that they have wronged me—that—that the accusation they were so ready to bring against me was a false one?{272}”

A pang of real apprehension nipped Miss Ransome at this supposed solution, but she was quickly reassured.

“Nothing is changed,” replied Mrs. Tancred, solemnly. “Least of all the immutable, eternal law, that we must abide the consequences of our own actions. You have made your bed, and you must lie on it. You had better be in the morning-room by eleven to receive them.”

“Why should I? It is not I who have brought discord and disunion among them.”

A transient—very transient—gleam of amusement shot through Bonnybell’s brain at the idea of Camilla’s charms working havoc in any happy home, but it was gone, engulfed in gloom before she had realized its presence.

“I know that I have no right to ask it,” she said, throwing all she knew of humility, deference, and desperate beseechment into her voice, “but the knowledge that you were near me—that you thought I was in the right—it is so seldom that you have been able to think me in the right—would be the one thing that could enable me to go through with it. I—I feel rather shaken, after yesterday, and—and as if—I could not bear much more.”

There was a pause. Perhaps the appeal, borne on its helpless low wail, went straight to the ever-empty mother heart of Mrs. Tancred. The girl before her was an ill-conducted little{273} adventuress, but if everything about her, except that clinging attitude of prayer for help and belief in her power to aid, had been different, it would have been sweet to have called her daughter.{274}

CHAPTER XXV

The visitors, arriving ten minutes before their appointed hour, were welcomed—though that is scarcely the word to express the profoundly grave and fully armed civility of Mrs. Tancred’s attitude—by Camilla alone.

The primal emotions had, in one respect, acted upon Mrs. Aylmer in the same manner as upon her son. Gentle and suave-mannered as she usually was, to-day she had evidently forgotten, or at least brushed aside, all the conventions. What place had they in the map of such a calamity as hers?

“Of course, she will see you,” replied Mrs. Tancred, with a dignified acquiescence in the abolishing of all preliminaries, and ready, as usual, to go direct to the heart of the matter; “that is to say, if, after what I have to tell you from her, you still think it advisable.”

“What have you to tell us?”—coming a pace or two nearer, as if to snatch the answer more quickly—“that she is ready to renew her engagement? Oh, it must be that.{275}”

“She is not ready to renew it,” replied Camilla, coldly; “why should she be?”

For a moment the other was too knocked out of time by this answer to do anything more purposeful than give a sort of stagger, and the combatants looked at each other in silence, Camilla noting, with a rather grudging, yet not shallow compassion, how dreadfully ill and aged her friend looked. She and her daughter were both dressed in black, as Volumnia and Virgilia had been on their mission, and though Mrs. Aylmer was as little like Volumnia as Bonnybell was like Coriolanus, the motive of their dusky habit was the same.

“I am sure that you would be the last person to encourage her in such a revengeful spirit,” Catherine said presently, speaking for the first time, and with a good deal less of heartbreak and a good deal more of resentment in her voice than had found place in her mother’s. “Of course, we had never wished to be connected with her. How could we? And when this hideous accusation came, we naturally waited for an explanation of it, but she would give none. She simply walked out of the house.”

“And in my judgment it was the only course of action open to a decent woman after such an insult,” replied Camilla, incisively. Mrs. Tancred had never been very fond of Miss Aylmer, but her conscience, alarmed now at the pleasure she was aware of deriving from snubbing her, drove her into an admission of the justice of a part, at least, of Catherine’s contention. “I perfectly{276} agree with you in your unwillingness to be connected with Miss Ransome, and congratulate you sincerely on having escaped so very real a peril.”

“But we have not escaped it; we do not want to escape it! You must not call it a peril,” cried Mrs. Aylmer, incoherently, distracted at the injury which was evidently being done to the cause she had come prepared to spend her heart’s blood in pleading. “I dare not go back without her. You have no conception of the state he is in. He has renounced us all. He swears he will never see one of our faces again. He has said things that I could not have believed possible to me—his own mother. Oh, if you had children of your own, you would understand, but of course you cannot; how should you?”

Mrs. Tancred met the half-unconscious cruelty of this tearing open of one of the two lifelong raws of her life with Lacedæmonian fortitude. If she suffered she showed it only by a slight addition to the cold kindness in the controlled and measured words of her next speech.

“I am extremely sorry for his and your sufferings; even my naturally defective sympathy tells me how acute they are. My concern is the deeper as they have been inflicted by a member of my household.”

“Oh, we do not blame you for that!” put in Catherine, resuming the rôle of spokeswoman with something like eagerness. “We are not so unjust. Of course, when you took her in you{277} had as little knowledge as we of what she really was.”

“I have no wish to be exonerated from blame for doing what I—mistakenly, perhaps—conceived to be my duty. Nor, since you need no longer lie under any apprehension of nearer connection with her, can it concern you what Miss Ransome really is or is not.”

“Oh, Catherine, what a false impression you are giving,” broke in Mrs. Aylmer, with something of the distraught readiness of the real mother in the Judgment of Solomon to say anything or do anything that would save her son. “It is no question of what she is or is not, and we are sure that she is everything that is nice and right, and we ought never to have taken any notice of that abominable letter. It was against my judgment that we did it.”

“It seemed right to give her an opportunity of clearing herself,” replied Miss Aylmer, in a crestfallen voice, and with a suspicion of nearing tears; “at least, so it seemed to a valuable outside opinion.”

There was such a belligerent note in the query that Mrs. Aylmer’s alarm at the adverse way in which her battle was going rose to panic.

“Send for Bonnybell!” she cried, with hysterical imperativeness. “I must and will see her. If she is not a fiend—if she has not the heart of a{278} stone, she cannot help relenting, when she sees to what a state she has brought us all.”

Thus it came about that two or three minutes later Miss Ransome, who had been kept in readiness by Camilla’s order, to be produced if her presence were insisted on, appeared on the scene. As she stole in mouse-quiet, snowdrop-pale, the recollection of the last occasion on which she had been summoned to the same room to meet the same two persons darted into her mind. She saw herself frisking up to Mrs. Aylmer, confident of an excellent reception; and the scene of ignominy and disgrace for her that had followed upon that ludicrous accusation of having corrupted stupid Meg’s mind. She was in a better position now; arbiter of the destinies of a whole highly respectable family, she, Bonnybell, poor Claire’s daughter! A spasm of unforgivable laughter seemed likely for a moment to choke her; but the disagreeables of a situation out of which it would take all her ingenuity to wriggle herself conjured it.

“We have come to beg you to forgive us!” Mrs. Aylmer said, precipitating herself to meet the object of her entreaties, and speaking with a trembling eagerness of humility which in its reversal of their natural attitude towards each other gave even Bonnybell a shock.

Before entering the room she had been putting to herself the humorous suggestion, “Shall I make them walk round the room on their knees to me, as poor Toby volunteered that they should?” That question now received a decided negative. “It really would not give me any{279} pleasure!” The ravages it was impossible not to verify on the smooth middle-aged fairness of her would-be mother-in-law’s face gave Miss Ransome anew the measure of the mischief she had done. “Poor creature! she looks nearly as bad as Toby did! I am afraid that I have given her a couple of crow’s-feet that she will never get the better of!”

“We do not blame you for a moment; it was perfectly natural that you should do it, but perhaps it was a little hasty to leave us all in a minute, without a word.”

This plea was poured forth with such painful velocity that its utterer had to stop to draw breath, and Bonnybell felt that she must speak. She would far rather have stood silent in her impregnable fortress of injured maiden weakness.

“I supposed that you could not wish to keep such a—wicked girl—any longer under your roof!”

There was not the slightest tinge of vindictiveness in her tone, as indeed she felt none; the desire to come with flying colours out of a tight place, coupled with a very sincere if cool pity for the victims before her, leaving no place for any less amiable feeling in her mind.

“But we do not think you a wicked girl; it was all a misapprehension, and we quite see that we ought never to have shown you that—that disgraceful letter, or taken any notice of it. It was contrary to my opinion that it was shown you. No doubt the person whose idea it was, meant well, and we have got into a way of depending{280} on her judgment; but it will be a long time before I can forgive her for the harm she has done.”

“She always means well,” Catherine interjected, casting a reproachful glance out of tear-brimmed eyes at her mother for thus throwing the family oracle to the wolves.

“I suppose that you are alluding to Miss Barnacre,” Bonnybell said mildly, and glad to escape from the main issue into any side alley of the subject, “but please do not blame her; from her point of view she was perfectly right.”

“It is very generous of you to say so”—giving a final push overboard to the family sage—“and she will be as ready as we are to beg your pardon. She shall do it as soon as we get home. I am come to take you home with us.”

There was a quivering asseveration in the announcement of this intention that tried to exclude all possibility of question from it, but Bonnybell only gently shook her head.

“I dare not go back without you! I dare not face him! I do not know what you have done to him, but—oh no”—hurriedly correcting her phrase, in fear of its giving offence, “I do not mean that you have done anything; but—the—possibility of losing you—not that there is any danger of it now that everything is explained—has almost unhinged his reason.”

Once again a very profound regret for the completeness of her own handiwork occupied Miss Ransome’s mind, and for one second the idea of yielding to the frantic entreaties of the poor mother{281} before her, who had got hold of her hands, and was unconsciously but painfully grinding their little knuckles together, presented itself. One “yes” would end this odious scene—odious since the humiliation of her humiliators gave her none of the gratification she had faintly anticipated from it; and, after all, marriage with Toby would still be, in a sense, the harbour of refuge she had once thought it. But before she had taken any false step, a head much stronger than her heart and a poignant recollection of the horrors of yesterday came to her rescue. The anchorage was not nearly so good as she had believed, and how could any union be endurable between two persons whose views of matrimony differed so diametrically as hers and Toby’s? Hers a cool commercial bargain, sweetened by camaraderie and lightened by indifference; his—a sick qualm passed over her at the recollection, only twenty-four hours old, of yesterday’s agony of balked animalism; and the knowledge, relieved by no maiden ignorance, that the detested experience was only the porch to the mansion which Toby had prepared for her to dwell in.

But the instant of hesitation gave the crushed Catherine time and opportunity to throw in a phrase of exaggerated humility.

Bonnybell gave a slight groan. In her nature there was no vindictiveness, and the sight and sound of the absolute abasement of her enemies before her was for the moment undoubtedly disagreeable to{282} her; though a reflex action of her mind suggested that by-and-by she might find some matter for complacency in it. But meanwhile she must find something to say that would be noble and magnanimous and, above all, final; and, what is more, not overdo it. “I must say something very beautiful,” she reflected, “and where on earth am I to lay my hands upon it?”

“What else can you say?” she ended by sighing out, as if crushed under the weight of so enormous a suggestion. “Oh, nothing, nothing! You have said a great deal too much already; more—oh, how much more!—than I am worth.”

“This is waste of time,” said Camilla, striking in for the first time; and something in the sound of her harsh voice gave the sorely bested heroine a sense of being backed up which nothing in the unbiassed words justified. “These ladies have asked you categorically two questions; and you must answer them in the same way. Will you, or will you not, return with them to the Dower House, and resume your engagement to their son and brother?”

“No, a thousand times no,” replied Bonnybell, dropping upon those pliant knees, on which in any emergency she was ever ready to fall—“not while I lie under this dreadful cloud. I would far sooner die than bring a slur on his honoured name!” (“Bad and stagey,” was her own impartial inward comment on this flight. “Oh, how thankful I am that Edward did not hear it! He has such good taste. How it would have disgusted him!{283}”)

“That being the case,” continued Camilla, in an arid voice, whose matter-of-fact dryness did not give the impression of having been much affected by Bonnybell’s magnanimous outburst, and thereby confirmed its author’s own ill opinion of her achievement—“such being the case, there is no use in prolonging this painful scene. You had better leave the room; that is to say, if you are quite sure that your answer is final.”

“But it cannot be final!” cried Mrs. Aylmer, with almost a shriek, losing all self-control, and pouring out her words in a boiling strain of incoherent violence. “I will not hear of its being final! You cannot have understood what I was saying. I must have expressed myself ill. I tell you that I dare not go back without you. You do not realize what a state you have brought him to. I could not have believed it myself if I had not seen it with my own eyes. If I do not bring you back he will blow his brains out! Do you understand that? Oh, what am I saying? I am only setting you more against me. But just think what a case I am in! Only one son, and he hating and cursing me! You will have a son yourself some day”—Bonnybell gave an imperceptible shudder; maternity played but a small and unhandsome part in her life’s programme—“and some one will rob you of him, and then you will feel as I do towards you!”

She broke off, suffocated, and flinging the girl’s hands from her with a gesture of despair and rage.

“I must go into hysterics,” Bonnybell said to herself, “there is nothing else for it, and I do feel very miserable and upset. I had better make as much noise as I can. I shall be the sooner sent out of the room.” She was as good as her word.{285}

CHAPTER XXVI

In the height of a simoom it seems incredible that the face of Nature should ever recover from its distortion and resume its smiles and dimples, yet a few hours effect this marvellous restoration. In the case of the Stillington simoom it took less than a week to remove the more obvious signs of the devastation it had caused in its destructive passage. In less than a week the Aylmers had not only ceased to be the only subject of conversation, but by tacit consent had been banished from it as too painful a topic for even incidental allusion. In less than a week the distracted Toby, having thought better of—if, indeed, he had ever really entertained the idea of—self-slaughter, had actually set off on that globe-circling voyage which his cruel fair one had prescribed to him, and the rest of the Aylmer family were in mid-process of indignantly bundling out of the Dower House, to await inconveniently on the shores of the Riviera the completion of their rebuilding house.

“They are punishing themselves more than me,” was Mrs. Tancred’s sole comment upon the{286} announcement that her quondam friends could no longer bear to lie under the obligation of a roof-tree to her. But Edward, conscious of the strong hold of habit upon his wife’s mind, conscious also of her small power of making new friends, and of the tenacity with which she clung to ancient ties, recognized with pitying sorrow the cut which so painful and abrupt a severance of an old and pleasant relation gave her.

Only one sentence from that final interview’s stormy end which Miss Ransome’s well planned and timed hysterics had saved her from witnessing ever leaked out to the curious little public around. It had been addressed by Catherine Aylmer to Camilla, and must have been repeated in a species of triumph at its point and fitness, and have filtered through who knows what channel of confidential Barnacre or eavesdropping servants back to the ears of Bonnybell.

“We can only hope that you will not have personal cause to regret your championship!”

“What a cat!” was Miss Ransome’s inward comment upon this innuendo. “I am glad that she does not know how little difficulty I have in keeping dear Edward at arm’s length. But it is a word to the wise. I must be additionally careful.”

By Christmas everything at Stillington was to all appearances as it had been. Life ran in its accustomed grooves, and not even the yearly hospitalities, largely understood by and still more largely carried out by Mrs. Tancred, as regarded the surrounding poor, were allowed to interfere{287} with the resolutely resumed and ruthlessly adhered-to education of Bonnybell. Her eager offers to help in the dispensing of her hostess’s gifts, and arranging of her entertainments, were received with a curt and modified acquiescence. But a cautiously slidden out suggestion that a reprieve from study would help her to throw herself with more heart and soul into the work of benevolence met with a decided negative. To it was due the one sigh of regret ever breathed by Miss Ransome for her broken engagement. “If I had married Toby, I need never again have opened a book! It would have been impossible to know less than he did, and bad taste to know more.”

But, despite the considerable drawback of having to waste so much time on the improvement of her mind, the spirits of Miss Ransome rose, on the removal of the incubus laid upon them, to a height that often gave her grave uneasiness as to how to bridle and conceal them—spirits whose ebullition had to be worked off in low singings and childish skippings about her own room, before they could be tamed to the chastened sorrowfulness and veiled heartbreak which beseemed their supposed condition. Even with the nicest care a spurt of young joyousness would go nigh to betray her, but, happily, in each case Edward had been the sole witness, and Miss Ransome had never felt quite sure that Edward had found the evidences of her affliction personally convincing. How soon might she begin to be cheerful again? Earnestly she wished that she had some{288} one to consult on that head; and sometimes the grotesque notion of taking Edward’s opinion darted across her mind; the hypothetical idea of what would happen supposing she were to put to him the question how soon—in case he were bereaved of Camilla—he would think it seemly to dress his countenance again in smiles? But, after all, it would not be a parallel case, since Edward never suffered from high spirits, and the experiment would probably blow the hospitable floor that carried her from under her feet. And, meanwhile, her inconvenient gaiety stood the shock not only of the rigorously pursued cultivation of her intelligence—for, after all, it was astonishing how little one need learn if one put one’s mind to it—but the information conveyed to her, without any explanation of its reason, that the family’s yearly habit of migrating to London after Christmas was this year to be intermitted.

There was, therefore, nothing visibly ahead of her but the monotonous life she was at present pursuing. Of course, it was assommant as to dullness; and the only wonder was that she felt its oppression so little. She supposed that she must be kept up by the little fillip of Edward’s daily return; and the—as daily—effort to present herself convincingly to his mind as a very nice and thoroughly truthful young girl! The enduring doubt as to what progress—if any—she made in this praiseworthy task kept her zest for it keen.

As for Edward, if his estimate of his guest still held any elements of uncertainty, it was not for want of thought upon the subject. How{289} could he help thinking of her? Was not she the one scarlet thing that stood out saliently from the iron-grey background of his life? How could he help, when on his daily downward journey from Paddington his evening paper was finished, and even whilst “Telegrams” and “Stop Press” were writing themselves on his retina—how could he help the ever-repeated question asking itself, “Has she got into any fresh mischief to-day? If she has, how can I hinder her telling me lies about it? Has she any more glimmer of a sense of the existence of such things as truth and honour than when she came to us?”

For the first week or two after the angry flitting of the Aylmer family had been accomplished, Mr. Tancred had anxiously watched his wife, partly in an intensifying of the compassion he always felt for her, partly in a fear that the irritation of nerves caused by the break with the inmates of the Dower House might wreak itself upon Bonnybell, instead of—as he devoutly hoped it might, in pursuance of a habit of fifteen years—upon himself. But he found with relief that his fears on this head were groundless. Camilla, it is true, continued to snub her pupil with unstinted liberality, and ruthlessly pruned away the little fripperies with which Miss Ransome tried cautiously to qualify the morose black of her mourning garb; but a smile forced its way oftener than she was aware into her hard eyes when the girl entered the room; and she never failed—whatever her effort to the contrary—to break into that laugh of hers, so rare, hitherto,{290} as to be almost terrifying, over Bonnybell’s games and idiocies with Jock.

But to do Miss Ransome justice, her worst enemy could not deny that at this period of her history she was a very agreeable inmate. The extreme unpleasantness of her late experience, the fright it had caused her, and the entire absence of an opportunity for a temptation to new errors, combined to make her “conduct as the noonday clear.” It is not the highest qualities which make men or women facile à vivre! The tender conscience, the high ideal, the strong affections, when brought into friction with the wrongnesses, the basenesses, the coldnesses of everyday life, produce rubs to the temper which are avoided by the cool heart, which does not care enough for anything to ache; the pliant temper, which gives in because nothing matters much; the absence of aspiration, which acquiesces pleasantly in the actual.

Bonnybell was, as her housemates more and more realized, a shining instance of the value of small virtues in daily intercourse. She was immovably good-tempered, invariably civil, always on the look-out for opportunities for paying little attentions, light-hearted even beneath the pressure of the severe affliction under which she was at present labouring, yet subdued in her mirth as in her graceful movements. Even her efforts to avoid her studies were made with the most shrinking delicacy, and their frustration met with the quickest, sweetest acquiescence; and lastly, her skill in applying antiseptic to Joc{291}k’s wounds when the latter’s lifelong feud with the second coachman’s yellow Irish terrier culminated in a battle, which, like Waterloo, “with Cannae’s carnage vied,” was beyond praise. Now and again, indeed, but more and more rarely in Camilla’s presence, some all too intimate trait relating to the habits and haunts of a class never to be recognized as existing by Mrs. Tancred’s school—some startling theory, fact, or opinion, concerning population or the relations of the sexes, would slip out. But these were but tiny blemishes upon the else spotless white of her life and conversation.

So January passed, questionably enlivened by a few stiff shooting-parties, during which the modestly proffered attentions of Miss Ransome to the least attractive among the guests were patent to all eyes, and reaped an immediate harvest of approbation; while her one or two unlucky lapses from jeune-fille-ism in conversation did not transpire till long afterwards.

January was drawing to its close, when to the uneventful household at Stillington the post brought one morning a piece of news which was received and commented upon according to their different characters by the three persons who learnt it. The news in question was communicated by Mrs. Glanville, and announced the fact that, by the perfectly unexpected accidental death of the head of his family, an unmarried cousin less than half his age, her husband had come into possession of a barony and a rent roll of thirty thousand a year.{292}

Camilla said, dryly, that she hoped the command of so much money—since, of course, given the weakness of Tom’s character, the whole disposition of it would lie with her—might not lead Felicity into chimerical schemes, like her Guild of St. Swithin, the members of which were to devote half of every wet day to intercession for their erring sisters in society.

Bonnybell’s contribution, though made half under her breath, was unfortunately audible—

She was a little off her guard, suddenly dazzled by the brilliant accession of consequence and fortune that had come to her former—nay, as she had reason to know—her present admirer, and wondering whether or not she had been wise in so firmly, though sweetly and sadly, refusing the surreptitious correspondence that poor silly old Tom had pressed upon her. Her ruminations were broken in upon by a short—

“You have a happy knack of giving an indelicate turn to what you say,” Camilla said severely; “and if you have no more valuable contribution to the subject to make, I think you would do well to be silent.”

Bonnybell bowed her head, and one shining tear dropped in her lap. It was due less to the rebuke than to an inward reflection of what luck some people had, and how it was thrown away upon them. Even better than Felicity she{293} could have turned old Tom round her finger; but to what a different tune would she have set his gyrations!

The subject was not afterwards much discussed in the little circle, nor did it at first appear to have much bearing on the three lives of which that restricted circle was composed.

A wily hint from Miss Ransome as to the propriety of her paying a visit of congratulation to the late Mrs. Glanville, now Lady Bletchley, in acknowledgment of former hospitalities, was not taken up. It might so easily have been combined with one of those trips to London which since Christmas had been of bi-weekly occurrence. They were undertaken under the strict surveillance of Camilla’s maid, and had for object the receiving of lessons from masters, in addition to the private teaching at home. As pleasures they were, in Bonnybell’s opinion, better than nothing, but what a mockery in comparison of what they might have been!

Generally Edward returned by the same train, but as he invariably travelled in a smoking-carriage, and drove himself home in a dog-cart, her opportunities for those tête-à-tête talks with him, for which her zest was daily growing, were confined to a very few minutes’ pacing of the Paddington platform together. There was the Sunday walk, indeed, which had become a habit, and to which she looked forward with an eagerness which she was obliged generally to explain away to herself. “There is not really the slightest risk; he has himself well in hand; and as for me, the only{294} reason why I am fond of him is that he is not like a man—at least, not like the bestial men I have known.”

Their course was almost always about the park, and through the whims and variations of an English winter Bonnybell, had her senses ever been much open to the sweet surprises of Nature, might have learnt how much beauty even January holds in her hard lap; what wild fantasies of ice-flowers on oak and beech, when sudden frost had surprised their wet boughs; what pensive dignity of mist-enfolded coppice and spinney! She was generally much too busy talking to be aware of any difference in the effects presented to her eyes. One is happily not expected to admire in winter, and so as the north wind did not succeed in piercing the astrachan fur under her chin, nor the crisp grass wet too much the thick boots which Camilla compelled her to wear, she asked no more of the outside world of Stillington.

At first Edward had tried to open her perceptions to the phenomena around her, attributing her obtuseness to the defectiveness of her training; since the eye, strangely enough, has to be told what to see, and the ear what to hear, quite as much as the brain what to admit and assimilate. But a short time sufficed to show him the uselessness of the attempt. Miss Ransome was, and was likely to remain, Nature-deaf and Nature-blind! There was something even pathetic, or so it seemed to her companion, in her efforts to do what was expected of her in the way of appreciation; and though among what seemed to{295} her the shivery drearinesses of the winter snow it was difficult to guess what one was expected to admire, yet her quick tact prevented her from falling into any very gross error. She even, during a spell of hard weather, got up quite a successful show of interest in tracking on the snow the footsteps of some little animal which puzzled Edward; and though her suggestion that perhaps it was a loup garou did not help him much, none the less was he grateful for the good fellowship shown by her aid in the investigation.

At first, by a tacit united agreement, they had avoided the Dower House, but one day, because it lay in the direction preferred by Jock, they found themselves half-accidentally in its neighbourhood. It was on one of the two showery Sundays that they found themselves looking up at its gables and dormer-windows from the closed gates. The dead eyeless look of a house whence the dwellers have departed was accentuated by the cold layer of white that hid the beauty of the old grey slates of its high-pitched roof, and by the many humps that indicated the whereabouts of its garden-beds. A small but piercing air blew in their faces, chill as the liking of the self-ejected friends, that had been wont to give so warm a welcome to one of the two persons who peered silently through the iron-work of the fine old gates.

“Let us come away,” Bonnybell said softly. “This must make you feel bad.”

He turned and looked full at her, which he did not often do, and she felt or imagined a glint of irony in his eye. It was not a happy moment, perhaps, for the bringing up of the fable of her affliction. The snow had had the exhilarating effect it mostly has upon dogs, and had made Jock forget his years, and sent him plunging through little drifts and scattering the frozen powder flying about his rejuvenated heels.

Bonnybell had no years to speak of to forget, and she had plunged and frolicked too; and now stood betrayingly rosy and radiant, surveying the casket of her lost treasure. Something in the tone as well as the eyes of her companion in putting his apparently sympathetic question, sobered her at once.

“You think that I ought not to be so cheerful?” she asked in a troubled tone.

The answer was not quite up to Edward’s usual standard of amiability; nor could Bonnybell divine that it was irritation with himself at the discovery of how little he really missed the Catherine of past Sundays that gave a touch of ill-nature to his response. She took the faint snub, as she always took all snubs, in unresenting silence; but when they had turned away from the house, and were walking homewards, she meekly took up her own defence.

“Do not you think that one is right, for the sake of the people one lives with, not to show too plainly when one is unhappy?”

“And perhaps, in a way, it is not as great a blow to me as it might have been to some one else, because I have no temperament.” She made this singular confidence quite glibly and without any consciousness of its being unusual. But, used as he now was to her, it startled Edward so much that she was able to add thoughtfully, “Toby has a good deal.”

The shyness resulting from the reception of this obliging revelation was on Mr. Tancred’s side, and it kept him dumb.

“The kind of love I should like to inspire,” continued Miss Ransome, forgetting to kick the snow as she had been doing with childish pleasure, “is the nice quiet sort that would look after me, and keep disagreeable things and people away from me, and never expect anything beyond; but”—with pensive regret, yet not the slightest hesitation—“that is just the kind I never get; what I am offered is always the other—the horrid sort.”

The winter dusk, though nearly due, was, owing to the snow-shine, a little deferred; and it would have been impossible for any one looking at him not to see that Mr. Tancred was growing very much out of countenance. He wished he could stop her, but nothing came to him in time to arrest the still more embarrassing revelation that followed.

“I am going to tell you something that will make you laugh,” she said in a tone of frank and gently mirthful confidence. “Do you know that when first I knew you, I thought that, of course, you would be like all the rest! I was{298} afraid to be left alone in the room with you!” She ended with a glance at him of expectant enjoyment of his enjoyment of the joke.

Exhilaration was not quite the leading characteristic of his half-strangled answer.

CHAPTER XXVII

There was nothing unusual in Camilla’s spending a day of unexplained occupation in London. It therefore excited no surprise when, on a certain Saturday at the end of the first week in February, she departed on one of her silent excursions. It could not have had for object shopping, an occupation for which Mrs. Tancred cherished a dislike as vigorous as were most of her feelings and opinions. If her companions gave a thought to the subject, it was to decide that her errand must be one of the many noiseless good deeds which she hid as if they were crimes. The trumpet blown before actions, so inspiriting a sound in Felicity’s ears, was harshest discord in her sister-in-law’s.

Camilla returned by dinner-time, but did not during or after that repast give any of the slight indications which sometimes escaped her as to the where or the what of the day’s work. She was rather, though not very noticeably, more silent than usual. Not till after luncheon on Sunday did any perceptible change in her habits appear.

To Edward, dreamily puffing in the smoking-room, where Bonnybell, despite all her delicate{300} hints, had never been invited to join him, his wife appeared. It was the hour when she was wont to retire to her religious exercises; and the inexorable rigidity with which, in the face of any and every obstacle, she adhered to the rule caused a look of surprise to dawn on her husband’s face as he took his cigarette out of his mouth, and rose courteously, as he always did, to receive her.

“You are surprised, and I dare say not particularly pleased to see me?” she said, with her usual crude directness.

“Why indeed?” she answered. “It is not the spirit in which I wish to enter upon a subject that has grave bearings on both our lives.”

Her tone made him a little uneasy, though not so much so as if she had been any one else, since he knew her habit of viewing all life—even its slightnesses—from a serious standpoint.

“Whatever it is, let us at least face it under as comfortable conditions as we can,” he answered with a resigned smile, wheeling the austerest of his armchairs, and the one therefore best suited to her liking, nearer the fire for her.

He was surprised at not receiving a rebuke for the luxuriousness and self-indulgence of the sentiment, but she only assented mildly—

“Yes, if you do not mind, I will sit down, as what I have to say must take a certain amount of time.”

There was a pause. Camilla had laid aside her spectacles—a sign of good augury in her husban{301}d’s experience for her amiability; and now sat with her gaze abstractedly fixed on the old sporting and coaching coloured prints, which the eyes of her ugly solemn childhood had contemplated. He waited with an air of patient deference. Once, long ago, an ill-natured remark had reached his ears to the effect that his manner to his wife was charmingly filial, and though the jeer had cut him to the quick, he had made no consequent change in it.

In a few minutes Camilla had apparently collected and marshalled her ideas, and began to speak. The opening took him by surprise.

“I do not think that I have ever been open to the charge of being a malade imaginaire.”

There was a startled touch in his answer. “I think you have often been a bien portante imaginaire, and overworked yourself grossly in consequence.”

“I have not felt in quite my usual health for the last three months. At first I attached no importance to the fact, recognizing that at fifty-one cannot expect to have the vigour of twenty-five.” The appearance in conversation of the grand climacteric was always, as they both knew, a bugbear to Edward; but for once he recognized that there was no intention of galling him in its introduction. “But of late”—she paused, as if to choose the words best fitted for a weighty communication; then went on steadily—“I have had reason to suspect that something further must be wrong with me than the failure of power attendant upon the approach of age.{302}”

At another moment he would have reproached her with a phrasing that might have better befitted her had twenty more years been added to the detestable fifty, which were always being thrown in his teeth, but now a painful suspense as to what was coming kept him dumb.

“Such being the case, I thought it wise to consult a specialist upon cases such as I concluded mine to be. I therefore made an appointment with Dr.——, which I went up to London yesterday to keep.”

“And never told me a word about it!” he broke in, with an almost angry upbraiding in his tone.

“Why should I?” she answered, looking at him with a stoical kindness. “Have you the power of life and death in your hands? I knew”—an expression of resolute pride settling on and dignifying her rugged face—“that whatever he told me, I should be well able to bear it.”

The question shot out with an abruptness most unlike Edward’s doubtful and suggestive methods, but the tidings sprung upon him had taken him by the throat.

“He could give no decided opinion; there was mischief undoubtedly—yes, but whether malignant or benignant” (a scornful accent on the last word)—“you know the patter of medical phraseology!—it was impossible, at the present stage of the disease, to decide. I am to visit him a second time at the end of two months, when he may perhaps be better able to judge, though even{303} then my fate may be still uncertain. The malady may successfully attack life, it may be comparatively harmless; it may be arrested, it may not; its progress may be slow, may be fast. There, you know as much as I do!”

Looking in his face, she could not think that it was indifference which kept him still mute at the end of her cool and lucid statement.

“I have never been much afraid to die,” Camilla went on presently, in a voice absolutely destitute of all excitement, but with a sort of reverence in it. “Death or life! If I do not deceive myself, I am ready to face the one, I am willing to face the other.” (Across the remorseful smart in the husband’s heart there flashed the painful doubt as to which alternative the willingness applied to.) “The point of the trial lies to me in the uncertainty. I have always been too fond of certainties; that is, doubtless”—with an acquiescent awe in her tone—“why this particular form of ordeal has been sent me.”

Edward had never been much a master of words, and out of the tumult of rueful pain and dazing surprise which now filled his heart and brain, none came to his aid. He could only catch the lean hand nearest him as it hung over the arm of its owner’s chair and press the oldfashioned rings into the spare flesh in an access of remorseful sympathy.

“You must not misunderstand me—must not jump to the conclusion that there is any{304} certainty to go upon; there are not yet sufficient data to build upon either way.”

There was none of the too-frequent irony and sarcasm in her tone, and yet he realized with a horrible pang that she was warning him not to be too hopeful of—not to count too confidently upon—a speedy release.

“You have been suffering pain and misery all this time, and I have never guessed it! Could brutish stupidity go further?” he ejaculated, finding speech at last, though of a choked sort.

“No,” she answered, her rigid truthfulness in revolt against the exaggeration of his self-accusation. “You have no cause to blame yourself; there has been nothing noticeably different in me. There need not be, as far as I can gather”—she paused a moment—“for some little while yet; and I have suffered no pain to speak of. If pain comes, I am under no apprehension of not being well able to endure it.”

The steady confidence of Mrs. Tancred’s tone was not needed to assure one who had lived beside her for fifteen years of her endowments in the way of dogged endurance. But the certainty that she would face the reality of death with the same high courage as she had faced the mockery of life did not go far to allay the stings and bites of his remorse. While she had been quietly bracing herself to meet the grip of a mortal disease, he had been mooning unobservantly along beside her, full of vapourish half-guilty dreams and sickly discontents.{305}

Presently Camilla spoke again. “I do not think that I should have mentioned the subject to you yet awhile—not until I had something more definite to tell, if”—a very slight pause this time—“I had not made up my mind, after full consideration given to the subject during the hours of last night, that, in view of the possibilities ahead of me—of us, it would be advisable to make some changes—one change, at least—in the arrangement of my—of our lives.”

No sound broke the reverence of his listening silence, but he felt as if there were a ton’s weight on the top of his head.

“If this is the beginning of the end—if, whether by inches or by some quicker action of the malady, I am to die, I think it would be better that Bonnybell should leave us.”

Edward bent his head in acquiescence. He had not consciously suspected what his wife was leading up to, yet when the climax came he felt that he had known all along that it was coming. A very sensible addition to the tumultuous wretchedness of his feelings lay in the fact that he could not disguise from himself that it came as a blow.

“I quite understand,” he answered. “It is perfectly natural that if you have to lead an invalid life, you should not wish to have a stranger living in your house.”

“You quite misunderstand me,” she retorted, with a good infusion of the wonted sharpness in her tone. “Bonnybell is no longer a stranger to either you or me, and it is a farce to pretend that{306} she is; and I have not the least intention of leading an invalid life. I hope to do a good deal of work yet, to go on working, if possible, nearly to the end.”

He had heartily hailed the surliness of her voice, as something normal and healthy, but he left her free from interruption to explain the idea which he had failed to comprehend. It was a minute or two before she did so.

“I think,” she said, the pettishness of eye and tone giving place to a deep solemnity, “that if these are to be the final months of my life, I ought to try and keep them as free as possible from unnecessary temptations to irritability and anger; from profitless friction to a temper which through all these years I have failed—as you know, to your cost—to bring under proper control.”

Courteous as he was by nature and training, it did not occur to Edward to utter a polite contradiction of a statement whose truth was so painfully well known to them both. He only made a slight gesture that might mean assent.

“My motive, as I have stated it, sounds wholly selfish; but it is not so”—her voice sank slightly—“for you, too, it is better that she should go.”

“Of what do I suspect you?” she repeated, looking at him with a remorseful kindness. “Of nothing worse than of wishing to put a little colour into the life I have made so grey for you.{307}”

There was none of the satiric bitterness with which she often alluded to the failure in the matter of happiness of their joint life voyage, only pitying pain; and only pitying pain, in full measure, rang in the remonstrance of his reply.

“Do not you think that you have made it greyer by always taking for granted that it must be grey?”

She assented almost gently. “It is possible. Since the great initial mistake, I have gone from one error of judgment to another, and I am not sure”—with an accent of humiliation—“that though I did it for the best, though I thought I saw the path of duty plain before me, that the last has not been the gravest of all.”

He did not ask her what that last and crowning lapse from wisdom had been. He made neither protest nor asseveration, and for a minute or two they sat gravely looking at the ashes in the grate, as if they had been those of her long-departed and his wasted youth. He had taken her hand again, and she suffered him to hold it longer this time. But even while it lay in its cold dryness in his, even while his heart seemed too brimful of ruth, of horrified sorrow and stunned surprise, to have room for any other denizens, there stole into it the insidious thought, “If Bonnybell is to be turned out, what will become of her?{308}”

CHAPTER XXVIII

“The sun has gone in. He was shining quite brightly half an hour ago,” Bonnybell said with a slight but meaning glance at the clock, and an accent of very gentle reproach.

The time for setting out on the weekly Sunday walk had been overpassed by forty minutes, and Miss Ransome was found, when at last joined by her tardy companion, fidgeting up and down the hall, with a look of upbraiding punctuality. Invariably hitherto it had been she that had kept him waiting, yet the strange thing was that even now he offered her no apology. He was too busy thinking what an unconscious aptitude there was in her words, “The sun has gone in.”

Edward would have much preferred to have intermitted the Sunday habit, which had grown so sweet, and which must shortly be abandoned for ever. It seemed an impossible feat in mental gymnastics to twist and wrench his thoughts away from the horrible coil of shocked pain and self-reproach which the last half-hour had wound round them, and turn them and his ears to the little trifling or doubtful topics on which{309} alone Bonnybell’s tongue frisked along with such gay glibness. He had come into the hall with the intention of asking her to let him off, of framing some excuse which would give him freedom to face the tidings of a hideous probability in the solitude which could alone steel him to meet it. But when he saw the girl his intention melted away. There was such obvious relief and pleasure in her little bright face, clearly following upon annoyance and puzzled misgiving, that he saw that his defection would cause her real disappointment—a disappointment, too, for which he could give her no reason.

It was always difficult to Edward to run counter to any one’s wishes; and, after all, what hurry was there for him to realize his wretchedness? He would, in Camilla’s showing, have weeks and months to do it in. Camilla—his poor, valiant, smitten Camilla!

“You need not look so miserable about it,” came a pretty little reassured voice in his ear; “it was only a passing cloud. He will be out again by the time we reach the bridge, and the days are so much longer now; we need not hurry home.”

“Only a passing cloud!” Into how deep an irony the aptitude of her former sentence had turned!

They walked almost in silence till the copse beyond the wooden bridge into the park was reached. There they paused to mark the progress made since last Sunday by the still small low snowdrops beginning to pierce the rain-softened{310} earth. Such advance in the knowledge and appreciation of Nature had been made by Miss Ransome that she had actually perceived them without their being pointed out to her.

“How pretty they are!” she cried with perhaps rather more enthusiasm than the humble blossoms really inspired in her. “I think their French name is prettier still—perce-neige. They always remind me of my old French nurse, Babette; she used to put them on her daughter’s grave in Mont Martre. The poor girl had been unlucky, had a baby and died of it; and Claire bought her a grave en perpétuité. Claire was very kind in those ways.”

The effort to induce Miss Ransome to drop the use of her mother’s Christian name in their tête-à-têtes had long been pusillanimously abandoned by Edward, and he now listened with a dull reflection how harmoniously immoral the surroundings of poor Bonnybell’s infancy and childhood had been, not even her nurse’s daughter having been able to refrain from having an illegitimate baby.

“I never could have believed that I could have grown to love the country so dearly,” pursued Bonnybell, inwardly wondering at the unaccountably occupied air of Edward, and determining to be even more endearingly rural than usual.

It was the first question he had put to her since their walk began, and she smiled inwardly{311} at its superfluousness. Of course she had rather be in London. Who but a fool wouldn’t? London or Paris! Were there any other places where a sane person who was not fifty, and had not a young husband whom she wanted to keep an eye upon, could wish to live? The only fear was lest her answer should let pierce through too much of the internal radiance kindled by the suggestion.

Edward’s answer lagged. He had not meant to tell his companion of the imminent change in their lives, yet now he felt that he was going to do so.

“Why should it be ‘we’?” he asked presently, with an exaggeration of his suggestive and querying manner. “Would not it do as well if you were going up?”

Her face told him that it would not. Half the light of glad expectation went out of it, and he was guiltily aware of the first sensation of pleasure that had touched him since Camilla’s communication.

“Are you only teasing me,” she asked, with a not artificial tremolo in her voice, “or do you really mean that I am to be sent away, after all? I—I—hoped that I had not done anything fresh lately.”

Her fallen countenance, the trembling diffidence of her accents, the cloud that, settling on her face, contrasted with the sunbeam which had shot through the leafless twigs to dance there, made him heartily repent of the undertaking{312} on which he had embarked. Why could not he have left it to Camilla? Then a knife of self-reproach turned in the fresh wound in his heart. Had not he always left everything disagreeable to Camilla? Was not it time—the time of which probably so little would be left to him—to take some share of the burden he had for fifteen years been shifting on to those enduring shoulders?

“Done anything fresh!” he repeated, trying to give an accent of lightness to the repetition of her fear. “Nothing beyond being more delightfully kind and helpful and spoiling to us with every week you have given us.” (Miss Ransome’s brow did not clear. Edward was not in the habit of complimenting her, and instinct told her that the enumeration of her merits had something ominous in it. He was leaning against a tree-trunk, and she noticed that there was a false nonchalance in the way in which he was stirring the dead leaves with his stick, and that he did not look at her, as he added a finishing clause to his civilities.) “But we cannot be so selfish as to hope to keep you always to ourselves!”

It was such a bolt out of the blue, that no wonder if a sort of darkness settled on Bonnybell’s vision. “I am bound to go to the dogs if they kick me out, as they are going to do,” she said to herself crudely, “and I shall have no more Sunday walks.” The collocation of two future events of such unequal consequence had something ludicrous in it, but for the moment the misfortunes prophesied counted to her as about equal.{313}

“It has been wonderfully good of you to put up with me so long,” she said after a pause; and even in this crisis of feeling she could not help thinking how infinitely better the natural tremble in her voice was than any of the many artificial ones she had executed. Its success was, as she at once felt, proportionate to its superiority. Edward forgot himself just a little.

“Put up with,” he repeated, in a key of low emphasis—“put up with sunshine and wonderful temper and tact! Has it been so great a credit to us to put up with these?”

Her quick ear caught the plural pronoun, and set her wondering whether Mr. Tancred was joining his old wife with him only for the sake of euphony? or, if her opinion of the temper and tact alluded to, and which she had put to the test so very much more severely than he had ever done, was as high as his, why this imminent expulsion?

“But because you have been infinitely good and forbearing to a cranky old couple is no reason why they should stand in your light!”

She could not even compass another tremble now, it would have broken into a sob, and it was too soon, as the tact he had praised taught her, to use that ultimate weapon. But something of the blank cold wonder that was icing her heart sat in her desolate orphan eyes as they looked in meek expectancy of her doom at him who had taken upon himself to pronounce it.{314}

“I am making a stupid bungle,” he said, averting his own eyes. If he did not fix them on some other object, he should have to close them, so unendurable to him was the sight of her little darkened face, unalterably sweet in its expectation of an imminent blow. “I am going on the supposition that you know what I am talking about, which of course you cannot do. Camilla has not yet had an opportunity of telling you, but this morning she received an invitation for you which she does not think it fair to you to refuse.”

“Camilla heard this morning from my sister Felicity, begging us to spare you to her. It seems that you made yourself so helpful and indispensable when you stayed with her last autumn that she has missed you grievously ever since. She wrote so urgently—Felicity is one of those people who always manage to get what they want—that my wife did not think it right to refuse her, more especially as she thought it would be doing you a good turn—giving you a pleasant change.”

His voice died away into an indistinct murmur. Every word uttered by him had been strict truth—to offer untruth to Bonnybell would have been, as has been already observed, sending coals to Newcastle. Yet in his own ears his statement sounded like a bad, bald lie.

Of its un-veracity not the slightest doubt traversed the girl’s mind. “What a much better story I could have made up,” she said to herself, with an artist’s pity for a croûte. Across the{315} unaffected quiver of her lips a slight sigh of relief stole. “There’s not a word of truth in it! As long as old Tom was alive, Felicity would never have asked me to stay with her again; but they are somehow going to force her to take me.”

Miss Ransome’s philosophy here began to return to her aid. “It is better than the streets, anyhow, and five minutes ago I did not see any other outlet. But I certainly am sorrier to leave Edward than a wretched little adventuress like me ought ever to let herself be about anything.”

These reflections did not lend themselves to utterance, and after all, as he had evidently made no effort to run counter to Camilla’s fiat for her dismissal, it was as well to make him feel as uncomfortable as an attitude of submissive but heartbroken silence could render him. Bonnybell’s heart was not of those that break, but there was quite enough of true stuff in the mixed woof of real and counterfeit which went to make up her attitude of sacrificial lamb bound to the altarhorns, to make it inimitably touching.

“The only wonder is that you should have kept me so long,” she murmured at last, with the most submissive figurative kissing of the hand that smote her, yet, in the turmoil of her spirits, forgetting to feign any belief in the supposed fiction of Felicity’s summons. “You will laugh at me, but I had begun to hope that I was becoming a little useful to Mrs. Tancred, that she was growing to be just a very little fond of me.”

Her slight, desolate smile at the fatuity of{316} having hoped to reap a small crop of that affection which to most girls of her age was a banal matter of course, reduced her hearer to a state of wretchedness far deeper than her mild aspiration after vengeance had wished.

“Laugh at you!” he said in a choked voice. “Laugh at you for believing what falls so far short of the real truth! You have been like a most kind and dear daughter to my wife—to us both.”

This last clause, with its evident effort to set the rickety situation on four strong straight legs, provoked so acute a mirth in Bonnybell’s spirit, sore as it was, that she had much ado to disguise it. “The poor dear is so determined to be my ‘papa,’ and he looks and feels so unlike it!” she said to herself. She drew a long, patient sigh.

“Thank you for saying so! I am glad that I am not being sent away in disgrace.”

“In disgrace? How can you misunderstand me so lamentably as to suggest such an idea?” Then, ruth and pity carrying him, like runaway horses, quite beyond the limits of his self-imposed commission, “Why, I cannot think how my wife will get on without you.”

At that a tiny smile stole to the drooped corners of her sad mouth. “He has always suspected me of telling lies, but my imagination has never run to such a big one as his!” Aloud she said, while the least tinge of malice, which she was unable{317} to get rid of, coloured the plaintive innocence of her speech—

“It is you, then, who have come to the end of your patience! you who, like Tom—Lord Bletchley, I mean—have put down your foot!”

At the pseudo-naïveté of this reproach Mr. Tancred’s pale face grew suddenly suffused with a hot flush, but he looked his interlocutor full in the eyes as he answered with a steady dryness—

The response showed her that he was as perfectly aware as she herself of the reason of her ejectment from the Glanville household; and also that he repudiated any kinship with Tom’s amorous weakness. The—in her experience—unexampled severity of his tone, coupled with the consciousness of having made a deplorably false step, combined to overset her. “It is time to begin to cry,” she said to herself, yielding by policy to what was a very real breakdown of self-control, and at once the obedient tears welled into and blurred the meek lustre of her eyes.

“It is hard that when we are going to part so soon we should keep misunderstanding each other!” she murmured, with just enough and not too much of a sob. “I never dreamed that you would think that I could imply that there was any likeness between such a person as poor Lord Bletchley and—you!”

The little subtle pause before the personal pronoun somehow gave a sense of so enormous{318} a superiority in the person to whom it referred to his unlucky brother-in-law, that Edward felt his temporary anger melting back into the original mass of misery from which it had sprung. How could she tell what a hornet’s sting her perhaps unintended insinuation had gained from that news of Camilla’s, of which she could know nothing? How could she tell that her flippant shaft had struck a heart and conscience already writhing with remorse? In word and deed Edward had been absolutely faithful to his wife. But how about thought? Despite his Pharisaical attitude, was he in reality so very much Tom’s superior?

“You have misunderstood me too,” he said, his voice resuming its courteous gentleness. “No doubt through my fault—my muddled way of explaining a plan which we thought would be for your happiness—give you pleasure!”

The plural pronoun dried her tears, which had done their mollifying work, and were no longer either needed or easy.

“I shall be very glad to see the Bletchleys again,” she said, with a resigned acquiescence; and unostentatiously passing a small fine handkerchief over her eyes and cheeks. “It is very good of them—of anybody—to take me in.”

The forlorn orphan note in her voice was the one he could least bear. Already he was telling himself that he had been too harsh to her, to this friendless fragility, shortly to be driven so reluctantly—despite her meek consent, there could be no doubt about the reluctance—from his door.{319} His door! No, had it been his, she would never have been driven from it!

Then the pendulum swung back again; the image of Camilla, with her future of probable agony and lingering death, resumed its supremacy in his mind, and in shocked return to his allegiance he spoke with a cool matter-of-fact kindness.

“You will find only Felicity at first. Tom is gone to Scotland for fishing. You know he is always glad of an excuse to get out of London.”

Had Mr. Tancred been able to see under the large white lids that drooped over Miss Ransome’s eyes, he would have noticed in those eyes a glitter that would have surprised him. “I thought so,” was her inward comment. “Old Felicity has her head too well screwed on to ask me there when Tom is at home.” Aloud she said humbly—

Bonnybell’s words carried a very delicately sad implication that her efforts to make herself acceptable in her present surroundings had been so unsuccessful as to prevent any sanguine hope of their flourishing better in another soil. Her inward ruminations proceeded a step farther on the path they had begun to tread. “Tom cannot fish for ever; and then?” Yet it was not the vista of future expulsions unfolding before her mental eyes that made her say to herself, “He must feel it too, though he tries to carry it off.”

There was a silence, not the dull indoor silence broken only by a buzzing house-fly or{320} a falling cinder, but the outdoor February silence invaded by the beginning melodies of new-wedded birds.

“I am afraid that I shall never now learn to distinguish the notes of the birds from each other, as you had promised to teach me to do,” Bonnybell said presently, with an exquisite modulation of chastened regret.

Her hearer had on other Sundays perfectly taken the measure of her ornithological curiosity, and was as aware as herself that it was got up only to gratify his own tastes, and had less than no existence out of his presence; yet something in the resigned yearning of her tone sent a look into his eyes which presently emboldened her to say—

“I must try not to think of these kind of things, mustn’t I?” adding a little later, with a tentative timidity, “I suppose you go to see Lady Bletchley now and then?”

But he had pulled himself together. “It is not much use looking up Felicity. As you are aware, female philanthropists are not often to be found at their own firesides.”

Her face fell, but presently regained a beam of hope. (“Of course, if he has not been in the habit of going to see her he could not begin now; she would smell a rat at once.”)

“Perhaps we may meet in the street accidentally some day,” Miss Ransome continued, with an affecting air of forced cheerfulness, yet feeling her way as she went along; “or, after all your kindness to me, it would be too dreadful to{321} think of never seeing you again! I would try—to meet—you anywhere—that was convenient—to you—if you gave me notice in time.”

He shook his head resolutely and quickly. Never had he felt less mirthful; yet a bitter amusement crossed his mind at the thought of the distance which the young creature before him had traversed since the not distant date, when, according to her own avowal, she had been afraid to be left alone in the room with him!{322}

CHAPTER XXIX

The transfer had been effected; the shuttlecock had returned to that one of the two battledores which had first propelled it.

“It seems as if you had never been away!” Lady Bletchley said, clasping Bonnybell to a heart still draped in complimentary mourning for the beneficent cousin who had turned her into a peeress.

“Yes, doesn’t it?” answered the new arrival, with a warmly responsive embrace.

It was not true. Half a lifetime’s experience seemed to yawn between the present moment and the one during which she had questioned Felicity as to Edward’s habits, and suggested Camilla’s rejuvenating herself with dye. But to assent to whatever proposition her host and hostess might choose to advance, more particularly in the earlier hours and days of a stay, was one of the fundamental rules of Miss Ransome’s code.

“It is very delightful to have you back!”—looking at the girl whose hand she still held with eyes so kind and admiring that Bonnybell made the comforting reflection, “I have evidently not gone off!” “I missed you dreadfully! It{323} was very good of me to let them keep you all this while—two whole months, isn’t it?”

Miss Ransome did not think it necessary to point out the trifling twist from strict veracity given to this sentence, but responded in meek correction of the faultiness of her patroness’s memory.

“To be sure! Three, of course. How sweet of you to remember the exact time that you have been away from me! And how did you leave them?”

“I did not see Mr. Tancred,” replied Bonnybell, with a very slight lagging of the voice, which tallied with an inward pang of resentment at Edward’s having shirked the farewell on which she had counted as the bouquet of her fireworks, by an earlier departure for London than his usual one. She added, “Mrs. Tancred was much as usual.”

As she spoke Miss Ransome’s mind repictured the parting with the iron-grey woman who had last ejected her; recalled the valuable presents ungracefully given, the handsome tip coupled with harsh advice as to the methods of spending it, the cold formal farewell ended unexpectedly by both giver and receiver in a sudden kiss and “God bless you!”

“Much as usual!” repeated Lady Bletchley, underlining Bonnybell’s colourless description. “I am glad to hear you say so!”

“The last time she was here I thought her{324} looking so exceptionally ill! She is always a shocking colour; but that day she looked livid. Of course, she pooh-poohed my anxiety about her; but, do you know, it has occurred to me once or twice of late that there must be something rather gravely amiss with her.”

Bonnybell looked startled. Mrs. Tancred’s complexion had never presented itself to the girl’s eye or mind, except as a harmonious part of her general ugliness. That its leaden pallor had any relation to ill health had never struck her. Something gravely amiss with Camilla! Did that mean that before long she was going to die? To do Miss Ransome justice, her first sensation when this idea presented itself was one of regret. Poor old Camilla! with her doughty championship against the Aylmers, and her handsome presents, and her tip, and that shamed and hurried yet motherly parting kiss! Poor dear old Camilla! It was only that second thought, which, despite the praising adage, is often a shabby thing, which presented the image of what would be the consequence of the extinction of the harsh old kindliness that had sheltered and fought for her! Edward with his handcuffs knocked off! Edward able conscientiously to let himself go! Whither? There could be little doubt as to the answer!

“I do not think I noticed any difference,” she replied slowly, seeing that her interlocutor was awaiting a response.

“I am very much relieved to hear you say so,” rejoined Lady Bletchley, as easily reassured as we all are when our hearts are not much{325} engaged. “Of course, you, who have been seeing her daily, are a far better judge than I. No doubt it was the effect of some passing fatigue which frightened me. I have been rather wretched about her, as, apart from the real regard I have for her, I cannot imagine what would become of Edward if anything were to happen to her!”

Miss Ransome bent her head in sympathetic acquiescence. “What a ridiculous misrepresentation! and how unnecessary!” she said to herself. She did not think the least the worse of Lady Bletchley for telling a lie, but felt a gentle pity for her for having produced such a poor specimen.

“But come, do not let us talk of sad things to-day of all days!” continued the matron, allowing her voice to resume a prosperous cheerfulness which came very naturally to it, and giving a final squeeze to Bonnybell’s fingers before dismissing them.

“No, indeed!”—following her companion’s lead with her usual sweet pliability. “And I have not congratulated you yet!”—with a pretty hesitating smile and a slight glance at the complimentary mourning.

“What about?”—with a rather transparent assumption of oblivion of her new honours.

“What about?” repeated Bonnybell, with a wise though inwardly amused air of being taken in by this simple affectation. “But I know how unworldly you always are!”

“I will own to you that Tom is unaffectedly pleased—very sorry for the poor fellow’s untimely fate, of course, but otherwise, very happy about it all. As for me, I frankly told him that I could see no great cause for elation in having to change a very old name for a rather Brummagem title.”

Miss Bonnybell listened with the restrained admiration for such lofty disinterestedness which she felt was expected of her, and put in at the end—

“You must remember how much more good you will be able to do. How often you used to regret that your means were rather limited!”

“Yes, if one keeps one’s mind on that aspect of the affair—indeed, I do not attempt to deny”—relapsing into nature and complacency—“that there are things about it that I like.”

There was a short silence, Miss Ransome in fond fancy scattering old Tom’s new millions with a liberal hand, and Felicity—— The trend of the latter’s thought appeared presently in a sentence tinged with a natural regret that had no pose in it.

“Have you tried Schwalbach?” asked Bonnybell, with heartfelt sympathy, and not for the moment recollecting that she was making her first lapse from jeune fille-ism; “and have you heard of the new doctor in Paris? Lady —— swears by him. She must be quite as old as you, and had been married twenty years, without chick or child; but now{327}——”

Lady Bletchley reddened. “It is not a subject I can discuss with you,” she said, dryly; but, mollified presently by the snubbed deprecation of the little innocent face opposite her, added, with an embarrassed laugh, “I see that Camilla has not, as I had hoped, succeeded in curing you of that deplorable habit of yours.”

Although feverishly eager to regain the ground lost by her slip, Miss Ransome could not help a very small smile, evoked by some pungent memory, yet it was with a mournful accent of remorse at the insuccess of the recorded admonishments that she said—

“Mrs. Tancred often corrected me; and I did try to improve, but I suppose it is because I feel so happy and at home here that I say just what comes uppermost.”

A little kiss, falling light as thistle-down upon the well-cared-for hand nearest her, and accepted in quite a different spirit from that which had shaken off those attempted to be executed upon Camilla’s bony knuckles, achieved the sinner’s forgiveness. It was in a comfortable tone of intimacy and prospective enjoyment that Felicity began her catechism as to Miss Ransome’s rural experiences, a catechism which the latter had foreseen, and, as far as possible, provided for, or rather against.

“Now tell me, did Camilla make any difficulties about letting you go? Was she much upset when my letter came?”

The attitude of Mrs. Tancred’s mind towards her own departure had differed so widely from the one with which she was thus credited that even{328} the ready Bonnybell had to hesitate a second or two before adjusting her answer.

“I hope she missed me a little, but she was quite determined not to stand in my light.”

“H’m! She thought it was to your advantage that you should come back to me?”

Felicity looked flattered, yet a faint shade of doubt clouded the complacency of her good-humoured countenance. Former experiences of her sister-in-law did not quite tally with the admiring estimate thus implied.

“She thought, too, that the life at Stillington was too quiet for a girl, and that a little London would be good for me,” resumed Bonnybell, perceiving the infant incredulity, and meeting it with less art than she would have done had more leisure been given her.

Lady Bletchley lifted her eyebrows. “Commend me to the inconsistency of a woman who piques herself upon being nothing if not consistent! Camilla has always given me to understand that I am imperilling my soul by living in such a sink of iniquity.”

The incredulity of Felicity’s tone was so decidedly increased that Bonnybell felt she was making fausse route.

“Perhaps I am mistaken, and that it was Mr. Tancred who said that London would be good for me.”

Her thoughts went back to the sun-smitten trunk of the leafless tree, and Edward leaning against it, looking miserable and trying to smooth{329} her fall by the unveracities with which she herself had now awkwardly saddled his eminently veracious wife.

Something in the accent laid by Lady Bletchley on her brother’s name alarmed Miss Ransome. “Oh, why did I put her on that tack? She is wondering whether he was tarred with the same brush as old Tom. What possessed me to mention his name?”

“Edward!” repeated Felicity a second time and thoughtfully. “So he had an opinion about it too!”

“He would have kept it to himself if it had not been,” replied Felicity, with a slightly sarcastic laugh. “Well, tell me all about it. How did you like Edward?”

The comparison instituted was meant by Miss Ransome as a compliment of the highest order, but in most human breasts there lie depths of self-esteem only accidentally hit upon by their acquaintances; and the tone in which Edward’s sister repeated “Of me!” adding, with a heightened colour, “Well, at all events, I always know my own mind,” showed that once again Bonnybell had mistaken the finger-posts of her road. She hastened to qualify her statement.

“Of course, your characters are not alike, but I noticed little turns of expression that brought{330} you back to me. I was so glad of anything which did that.”

This adroit and touching exegesis merited and received a caress, and a fresh start was happily made.

This negative scarcely pleased its utterer. It sounded to her own ears too emphatic, but it passed current admirably.

The slight tinge of friendly contempt in the tone and words would have roused another nature to angry partisanship; but, as Miss Ransome wisely and soothingly remarked to herself, paupers could never afford to be angry or to defend their friends, and she therefore curved her lips into an acquiescent smile.

The catechiser looked at her curiously. “I should not think it was easy for any one to forget that you were there.”

“I mean that I did not make much difference to him, one way or the other,” rejoined Bonnybell, still carefully labouring to erase some undesirable impression. “I was much more in Mrs. Tancred’s way, poor thing!”

“Oh yes, she thought it right to see a good deal of me. You see, she was educating me. She thought me so grossly ignorant. Of course I am.”

“I am going to educate you too,” returned Felicity, in a tone of slight pique, “in my way, which, I dare say, is rather a different one from Camilla’s. I assure you I have plenty of work cut out for you.”

“Oh, I am glad,” replied Miss Ransome, fervently, and bringing her hands together with a pretty childish gesture of elation, and inwardly congratulating herself upon the trend of the conversation away from a topic which she could not feel to be a safe one. But in this she rejoiced too soon, for after this slight diversion Lady Bletchley returned to the original theme.

“If I said them it was because I did not know that they were indecent”—with the prettiest air of hurt artlessness.

Felicity ruminated a minute or two, though, as the upshot showed, not upon the scabreux nature of her young friend’s conversation. It was clear that her inquisitiveness as to her relations’ ménage had got the better of her sense of decorum.{332}

The confidential character of words and intonation betrayed poor Miss Ransome into a new slip.

“I suppose,” she said, with a curiosity not at all inferior to that of which she herself was the object, “that their marriage has never been anything but a nominal one.{333}”

CHAPTER XXX

Felicity was as good as her word; nor was there any delay in setting the restored acolyte to her destined labours.

“I am afraid you will not find it very gay,” Lady Bletchley had said, “but what with this mourning”—glancing at the very diluted ink of her attire—“and the terrible corvée of getting into the new house, I really cannot be bothered with society just now. However”—with a consolatory shrug—“it cannot well be duller than Stillington, where I suppose you literally never set eyes upon any one except the Aylmers.”

The entire innocence of purpose evident in this mention of the family alluded to proved to a relieved Miss Ransome that her late hosts had kept the secret of her misdemeanors faithfully.

“By-the-by, I hear they have left the Dower House,” continued the other, carelessly. “What can poor Edward do with his Sunday afternoons!”

Upon this topic Bonnybell could have shed some light, but as the question took an ejaculatory shape she did not think it necessary to answer it.

Although Lady Bletchley had alluded to her{334} future change of house as a corvée, her haste to display the proportions of her new mansion—which deserved that pompous name for better reasons than the prosaic technical one of possessing a backstairs—to Bonnybell, took precedence of even her eagerness to set Miss Ransome to work; and in enumerating the length of feet to which the ballroom ran, and giving the genealogies of the cabinets and chimney-pieces, she forgot to be bored. Her companion’s mouth was filled with praise and thanksgiving, and her heart with upbraiding wonder at the ways of Providence. Fancy meanwhile sported among the alterations and improvements—all in atrocious taste—which she herself would make, were Tom’s affection blessedly to take a less amorous tone and he be moved to adopt and make her his heiress.

While awaiting this happy consummation she had to content herself with receiving flattering comments upon her intelligent sympathy, as contrasted with the block-like manner in which Miss Sloggett—Felicity’s secretary—had treated the wonders of French art and delicate eighteenth-century luxury displayed before her unappreciative eyes. In point of fact, the worthy lady, with a desire as sincere as Bonnybell’s to hit her employer’s mood, but a tact less sure, had expressed only an aspiration in imagined accordance with Lady Bletchley’s well-published philanthropy, that Lord Bletchley might be persuaded to sell all these useless superfluities for the benefit of the East End.{335}

This naïve proposal to return to methods inculcated by the Teaching beside the Sea of Galilee did not meet with the reception it expected, and Miss Sloggett was shown nothing more. Even the present exhibition to a much more understanding spectator had to be scamped.

“You are a delightful person to show things to, and there are any number more treasures for you to see”—the poor fellow was a well-known collector—“but the meeting is to be at four, and I have a good deal to arrange in connection with it beforehand. You will help me, I know. One is so cramped for space in Hill Street!”

The tone of resigned contempt in which the last clause of her speech was uttered showed that Felicity’s ideas had thus early expanded to the size of her new surroundings, and Bonnybell gave a sardonic inward chuckle. But she threw herself with such ardour and appetite into the arrangements for the function indicated, and showed such mingled capacity and suavity in her manner of assigning seats to the company when it arrived, as to draw upon her from Lady Bletchley further comparisons of an invidiously favourable character with the blundering Sloggett.

The meeting was that of a Ladies’ Debating Society, held by turns at the house of each of the members, and was of a now not uncommon type. The subject of discussion was “Domestic Servants. Whether they need culture. If so, how we are to give it them?” It opened with the reading of a fairly practical paper, much interrupted by voluble members. One large woman with a lisp, and{336} apparently enfranchised from the bondage of corsets, was irrepressible in suggestions—not valuable—and autobiographical experiences. A second joked rather scathingly. A third was sensible and serious, but dull. The fourth, and worst, a very foolish vessel, still more autobiographic, telling at great length of how she almost daily personally conducted her servants to the British Museum and the Tower. And when it was objected that this course must lead to difficulties as to the discharge of their duties, answered threadbarely, that if you wanted to do good you must make up your mind to sacrifice your own convenience to a certain extent, and that she kept a good many servants. The reader of the paper rejoined politely, but sarcastically, that perhaps those who had smaller households would suggest how the objection was to be met. And thereupon so many fair ones complied at once—the irrepressible obesity leading the van—that the chairwoman, Lady Bletchley, had to ring her bell repeatedly to call them to order.

“Perhaps some of the members at the lower end of the room will let us hear what they have to say on the subject,” Felicity suggested, when at length she was able to make herself audible, and looking encouragingly at half a dozen silent women. “Those at this end have taken up so much time in the discussion that the others have not had a chance.”

But the silent women remained silent, and the localized garrulity continued to rage fiercely, turning its boiling stream into the channel of the{337} G.F.S.; the foolish matron who announced the largeness of her establishment taking up her tale again, and going into details almost as intimate as, though less indelicate than, Mrs. Cluppins, when she appeared as witness for the prosecution in the trial of Bardell v. Pickwick, of her domestic economy.

“It takes a good deal out of one,” Felicity ejaculated, when at the close of the meeting—which every one present agreed had been a particularly good and helpful one—she and Bonnybell retired to Lady Bletchley’s private room, while the drawing-rooms were being restored to their normal state. “But, as you see, it is well worth it.”

“The society has only been started three months, and it has already done an untold amount of good.”

“Subjects are threshed out, and people are woke up to a sense of duties which they had either forgotten or never realized.”

“But”—with a yawn and a stretch of luxurious relief—“it does take a good deal out of one!”

“Has the lady who takes her cook every day to the British Museum a husband?” asked Bonnybell, feeling her way cautiously to a little gibe.

Felicity laughed. “Yes; but he can go to his club. Of course, she is a fool, poor dear;{338} but she is always good for a drawing-room meeting or a cheque.”

Miss Ransome was respectfully silent, musing upon the different roots from which the beauteous flower of female friendship springs.

“She is a Mrs. Slammer,” continued Felicity, between two luxurious yawns. “She was an heiress, and her husband had to take her name. He was a Colonel Ransome, a well-known fortune-hunter, but quite in society. By-the-by, he may be a relation of yours. Is he?”

Bonnybell paused a moment. It was not likely to heighten her consideration in the eyes of the world that her kindred had repudiated her; but, on the other hand, the fact of Miss Ransome’s friendless state might intensify Felicity’s compassion for her, and if she told a lie upon the subject it was certain to be discovered, so she said with a drooped head—

“Our relations would not have anything to say to us, and of course I could not give Cl—my mother up.”

“Oh yes, of course; it was stupid of me to forget. I remember now what unnatural monsters we thought them at the time; but, at all events, they did me a good turn in giving me you.”

This was charming, and Bonnybell would have been glad to be sure of being able to keep the thermometer of her friend’s affection up to the point indicated by this little burst of effusiveness, but even the next sentence showed a descent.{339}

“All the same, it might not be a bad plan for you to cultivate her—she is not a bad-hearted woman, and has kept him wonderfully straight; and, good and indulgent as Tom is to me, I cannot expect him to be willing always to have some one en tiers between him and me; and life is so uncertain—Camilla’s alarmingly so—that you cannot count upon Stillington.”

She paused, a little out of breath, or Bonnybell fancied so, from the haste with which she had scampered away from the clause that referred to Tom.

“There is no greater mistake than going to meet misfortune,” continued Felicity, distracted by her own reference to Stillington from the theme originally started; “but I really dare not face the question of what would become of Edward in the case of Camilla’s death.”

Bonnybell turned her head aside, with a little wincing movement that stood for emotion, but that in reality hid the ironic mirth which she feared must be in some degree making itself visible on her face at this grossly overcharged picture of Edward’s prospective affliction.

“Of course, they are very deeply attached to each other,” she answered mournfully, “but men do get over things.”

“Get over things! Deeply attached!” repeated Felicity, derisively. “Edward’s manner to her has always been perfect, his whole relation to her kept in a key of the most exquisite taste, and I am sure that he has a very sincere respect for her; but, poor dear Camilla”—with a little{340} involuntary laugh—“is hardly a person to inspire a grander passion. No, no; it is the financial aspect of the question that keeps me awake at night.”

There was nothing “put on” in the lengthening oval of Miss Ransome’s face at this announcement.

“Do you mean,” she asked slowly, “that Mr. Tancred would not be so well off if—he were to lose Mrs. Tancred?”

“Not so well off?” repeated Felicity, with an annoyed laugh. “That is putting it very mildly. Why, if Camilla were to die to-morrow, he would be left with his paltry younger son’s portion, and with whatever he makes”—the accompanying shrug expressed a minimum—“on the Stock Exchange.”

To put direct questions about other people’s finances had never been permissible by Miss Ransome’s code of manners, yet she asked boldly and blankly—

“It is no question of her not leaving him anything,” rejoined Lady Bletchley, impatiently, “but of his folly in refusing to accept a penny. At the time of the marriage he absolutely declined to allow her to make any provision for him, in the event of her death. It was a Quixotic notion that, because he did not care about her——quite between ourselves, she married him! Never shall I forget my stupefaction when I heard the news. ‘That old guy!’ I said—people used the word ‘guy’ more in those days than{341} they do now, but I dare say you know what it means.”

“Since he did not care about her”—picking up the dropped thread of her sentence—“he would not be indebted to her for anything but his board and lodging; and indeed” (with a renewal of vexed mirth), “I would not answer for it that he is not highflown enough to pay her even for that. I remember telling you once that Edward had strayed out of the Middle Ages; you see now what I meant.”

Miss Ransome’s knowledge of the period indicated was not equal to informing her whether the centuries alluded to were characterized by a marked aversion from profiting pecuniarily by unions with elderly heiresses; but she assented, adding, with a very grave face—

“Poor Mr. Tancred! he has indeed every reason to try to keep Mrs. Tancred alive!” Then, feeling dimly that the reflection had not quite a suitable ring, she hung on it a postscript. “And I am sure,” she said prayerfully, “that I heartily wish it, for both their sakes.”

“I am sure you do,” replied Felicity, but she spoke, or Bonnybell thought so, somewhat slowly, and looked at her rather hard, adding more glibly, “So you see that, considering the uncertainty of everything, it would not be a bad plan to cultivate the Slammers; and I shall see that you have every opportunity for doing so.”

Bonnybell thanked her, and wondered internally whether they would be likely to go to bed{342} early. It needed solitude to face such a new aspect of affairs as the last ten minutes’ conversation had presented to her.

“If Camilla died to-morrow, Edward would be almost as much of a pauper as I am!” This was the fact that could be better faced by Bonnybell with her hair hanging down her back in its nightly twisted cable and the enlargement of a dressing-gown. The added flights of stairs which Lady Bletchley would have had to climb made her visitor feel pretty secure from an invasion by her, but, to be on the safe side, Miss Ransome locked her door.

“A pauper!” During her eighteen years Bonnybell had known many persons who freely gave themselves that name; but it had never, so far as she could observe, produced any appreciable effect upon their mode of life or expenditure. She dimly felt that Edward’s pauperism would be of a different type. Her imagination tried to construct a pauper of the upper classes with a sense of duty to his tailor and wine-merchant. Would he smoke pipes, and drink gin-and-water, and wear napless hats, and reach-me-down overcoats?

The frame was one into which it was so impossible to fit the portrait of Mr. Tancred that she laughed aloud, secure in having a whole floor to herself. “My jaw dropped half a yard when I heard it,” she soliloquized. “I am afraid that Felicity must have noticed it.”

An advance upon the glass and a practise in{343} it of elongating her face to different lengths produced such unsatisfactory results that she soon left off her efforts to reconstruct her own attitude under the late thunderbolt. Nor did she disguise from herself that it was a thunderbolt! To do her justice, she had never, since hearing of its probability, consciously wished for Camilla’s death; yet there was no doubt that she had seen through a rosy mist, and at some future epoch, herself in various attitudes of near relationship to Edward.

People’s love-dreams are shaped consonantly to their characters; and Bonnybell’s were as artificial and sophisticated as herself. She saw herself whizzing up the Champs Elysées in an automobile in May when the chestnuts were out, in a dernier cri hat, by Edward’s side; sitting in an opera-box at Covent Garden, blazing in Camilla’s diamonds, reset by a jeweller of the Rue de la Paix, by Edward’s side; at Stillington, during one of their Saturday-to-Mondays there, smoking the best cigarettes procurable for money all over the house, and with no apprehension of any one smelling them, by Edward’s side; or without cigarettes, and receiving discreet and moderate endearments, well and easily kept within such bounds as she herself prescribed, from Edward.

To her own surprise, it was the last picture upon which she dwelt longest, and with most pleasure. And now her house of cards lay in ruins at her feet, and it took her all her philosophy, and a little more, to pull herself together, and extract any cause of congratulation that might be found among their débris.{344}

“What a mercy it was that we kept ourselves well in hand! I do not think he could have held out much longer; and as for me, whatever confidence one has in one’s self, it is well not to put it to too severe a test. I really believe that two more Sunday walks, if the sun had shone, and those birds whose notes I never could distinguish apart had gone on singing, would have finished me off!” After a pause, “I never could have believed that it would be hard to keep from being fond of any one.”

With that she dropped down in a sitting position on the hearthrug, and, embracing her knees with her lily arms and stooping her head down upon them, wept copiously. She went to bed later, and her last thought was a truly Christian one, “Poor dear old Camilla! Her death would not do me the least good in the world, and I sincerely hope she may live to the age of Methuselah.{345}”

CHAPTER XXXI

Miss Ransome’s eyes looked heavy next morning at breakfast. That her hostess noticed the fact was made apparent by a remark that followed her first glance at her guest.

“What an ass I was to cry!” was the unspoken response to this question. The spoken one ran more subtilely—

“It seems delightfully natural to see you here,” responded Felicity, with not inferior fondness. “But I must not have you looking pale because I keep you up listening to my tiresome worries; of course, they are multiplied tenfold since you were here last.”

She paused to heave a sigh at the thought of the burden of her new prosperities, and Bonnybell gently echoed it at the pensive reflection how easily her own shoulders would bear the load were it transferred to them.

“I shall send you out for a walk this morning,{346}” continued Lady Bletchley. “You look as if you wanted air.”

Bonnybell’s heart leapt at the prospect thus indicated of a solitude tempered by shops, but her voice repelled the suggestion.

“And leave you to cope alone with all that mass of work you told me of last night? Do I look very pasty? I dare say; I did not sleep very well; I suppose because I was too excited at being back again with you.”

This charming explanation was accepted as probable, and Miss Ransome’s conscience eased by receiving the assurance that she could be equally useful to her patroness doing commissions out-of-doors; that patroness’s lady’s-maid being apparently only inferior to her secretary, Miss Sloggett, in block-like stupidity.

An hour later, therefore, Bonnybell found herself walking down Bond Street, chaperoned by the functionary in question, and entrusted with many nice tasks of matching, pricing, and ordering. Shopping had always been inexpressibly dear to Miss Ransome’s towny heart; and though the choosing of vicarious finery was a very inferior pastime to the testing of colours and shapes upon her own light form and brilliant face; yet it would have been difficult to find an anodyne more effectual than that provided, with no such intention nor the least knowledge that any painkiller was needed, by her protectress.

Bonnybell had set off on her walk in the lowest spirits possible to one of her nature. She had not at all adjusted her mind to a future from{347} which Edward was eliminated. The insecurity of her present status, hinging on the more or less of water in the Scotch river honoured by Tom’s rod; and the dismal possibility of a livelihood dearly bought by conducting a Mrs. Slammer’s servants to those elevating museums and exhibitions in which she herself would never willingly set foot, called forth reflections not calculated to exhilarate.

But true philosophy, that “perpetual feast of nectared sweets,” never leaves its sincere votary long unsupported; and by the time that she had realized what startling surprises in shape and fabric the spring hats revealed, and that half a score of men had twisted their necks to get a longer look at her through the side window of their hansoms, Miss Ransome felt that there was yet balm in Gilead for her broken spirit. A really delightful hour and a half followed, spent in exhilarating intercourse with a couple of very smart dressmakers, during which she committed herself on her own account to two toilettes sérieuses, some trivial costlinesses in the way of “little” matinées, fichus, veils, etc., and three really bewildering toques.

Her purchases made a large hole in Camilla’s handsome tip—that is to say, they would have done if she had paid for them, but, as she piously said to herself, “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,” adding, less piously, that there was no reason why her future husband should not pay for them.

Reluctantly, and summoned by duty, she at{348} length began to turn her steps homeward, and was loitering a moment before a florist’s—the flowers that grew in shops were the only ones really admired by Bonnybell—and inhaling whiffs from the white lilac boughs and stacks of lilies-of-the-valley inside, when she was startled by a voice calling to her from an electric brougham which had pulled up at the kerbstone.

Who could be Bonnybell-ing her here in Piccadilly, whither her maiden feet had now strayed? The answer came all too soon, nor did it take more than one glance at the face of the very pronounced “chemical blonde” thrust out of the automobile’s window to tell Miss Ransome that she was once more face to face with her past and Flora Tennington.

“This is rippin’!” cried the occupant of the brougham, who occasionally borrowed a word of slang from the little young men who frequented her. “How long have you been up? and why have not you been to see me?”

“I came up only the day before yesterday,” replied Bonnybell, in a tone which implied that the lateness of her arrival was the only reason why she had not already sought out so chosen and valued a friend. One must not make an enemy of Flora; but what a piece of ill-luck!

As she spoke she stepped quickly across the pavement, to hinder, by greater proximity, the sharing by other ears of the unavoidable impending{349} dialogue; and tried to put her head so far inside the carriage window as to hide from passers-by the identity of her flamboyant friend.

At this query a horrifying vision passed before Miss Ransome’s eyes, of Flora, champagne-headed, low-necked, whitened and sealing-waxed, sweeping into Felicity’s drawing-room and falling on her own neck under that lady’s nose.

“I see,” she said, dryly; adding, “But at least come and take a turn with me. If you sit well back nobody will see you, and I have a hundred things to say to you. Come, get in!”

Bonnybell hesitated, though nothing could be more distasteful to her than her present position. At high noon, in open confabulation with a lady of Flora’s appearance and antecedents, exposed to the probability of recognition, and observed with respectful surprise by the chaperoning lady’s-maid, who, if she was of the block-like stupidity attributed to her by her mistress, was likewise of the highest and touchiest respectability. The sense of having conveyed to an old friend with brutal clumsiness that she was ashamed of being{350} seen with her annoyed Miss Ransome also, though in a less degree. She put her face—it seemed impossible that both were made of the same materials—very close to Flora’s, and whispered—

“There’s a dragon with me—an imbecile of a maid. I dare not send her back without me.”

This counsel, though its radical badness and inartistic quality was fully recognized by its recipient, was yet finally accepted, as being the least objectionable of the only two alternatives open to her. Flora, as she knew, would not let her go without a prolonged exchange of questions and answers, heard inevitably by the footman holding the brougham door open, and probably by a goodly number of Piccadilly flâneurs. Bonnybell had often before tipped servants to silence, and even when the tip was not very large or likely to have successors had seldom found reason to complain of their fidelity.

As Lady Tennington never cared what she said, where she said it, or who heard it, Miss Ransome decided that she had, on the whole, chosen practically the least perilous of the two vexatious paths open to her, when she and her companion were whizzing down the great thoroughfare.

“So it is all off!” said Flora, without preamble, as soon as they were in motion.

Miss Ransome was too old a hand, in experience if not in years, to be trapped into a confidence by the device of pretending to know all about it; so her rejoinder was a fence.

“Oh, come, do not pretend innocence; we have not too much time. Remember that it was I who first introduced you to him—turned you into the conservatory together, the day he came to your rescue when you were in such an abject fright at the idea of a tête-à-tête drive home with poor old Charlie.” She chuckled at the recollection; and, since the only way in which Bonnybell showed that she “rose” to this jogging of her memory was by a slight shiver, continued, “It came to grief over a letter. Did anything unlucky turn up? Did they find out anything?”

A slight repetition of the shiver produced by “Charlie’s” name ran over Bonnybell. Stillington might not have effected much in the way of moral teaching, but it had at least made Flora’s scheme of ethics unfamiliar. And Flora’s appearance did not gain in impressiveness by proximity. She had evidently lately embarked on a new dye, which had stained her hair with a brilliant pink hue. If it was champagne-coloured now, it was a very bad and headachey champagne!

There was a lovely maiden flush on Bonnybell’s cheek as she answered very gently—

Lady Tennington looked at her with compassionate surprise and amusement at the carefully{352} suppressed indignation lurking under her mild words.

“I know that; you always were a very good little miss!” she rejoined, laughing; then, more seriously, “Yes, you poor little devil, I really believe that you are speaking truth; and, of course, Claire had no business to take you to those places.”

The plea was set up with the customary generosity; nor did its utterer ever seem aware that the defence was in itself an indictment.

There could be no doubt that Flora did know, yet Bonnybell’s resolution not to go further in admissions than she was absolutely compelled was instinctive.

“Oh, how does one hear things? Servants, little birds, God knows what! I asked Charlie whether he knew anything about it, but he only laughed, and said, whoever the writer was, he had done Bonnybell a good turn.” (It was not because Flora’s pink hair and chalky face were disagreeable objects that Miss Ransome had turned away her head.) “Of course, I at once concluded that he had written it himself. He really will play these little games once too often, and get himself into trouble.” (To most people it would have seemed difficult for “Charlie” to effect that object more thoroughly than he had already done.) “I suppose that it is partly his way of showing his affection for you, and partly{353} that being in such low water himself has made him spiteful. My prudish friends tell me I ought to shut my door on him, but I am not fond of shutting doors upon people, it is not a pleasant process for either side.”

“Yes, so I was and am”—accepting the tribute as her undoubted due (there were so many tributes that never were and never could be paid to Flora)—“but it is not altogether that. I do not want to make an enemy of him; and, low in the world as he is, he could yet do me a nasty turn, as he has just done you. If you take my advice, my dear, you will keep on terms with him, despite his last achievement.”

Bonnybell heaved a most unaffected sigh. A feeling of disgusted despair took temporary possession of her sanguine breast. Was she never to be able to free herself from the environment of mud and slime into which circumstances, not herself, had plunged her? Was she never to get away from the past and its most hideous embodiment, Charlie? He had done her a good turn this time, but he would repeat his action when it would not be a good turn. She might be just about to pull off something really good—the eyes of the passers-by, both on foot and in hansoms, had convinced her how much lay in her power if she had a fair chance—and Charlie would come in again with his thrust in the dark,{354} another of his anonymous letters would arrive, and it would all be “blued”!

“I do not know. He comes and goes. I generally see him when he is up. I am afraid, poor devil, that mine is the only respectable house left open to him.”

A streak of sincere amusement stirred the younger woman’s gloom. Poor, dear Flora! she must be forgetting to whom she is talking. Perhaps Flora remembered, for she left the topic.

“It is more than I was,” replied Flora, dryly. “I never had such a run of bad cards in my life as I had there, and I always detest the country.”

“How can any one who is in their senses like living there?” agreed Bonnybell, fervently, deriving the first advantage she had yet reaped from the lost Edward in the ability to lay aside for ever her rural enthusiasms.

“I shall take a cottage on the river in the summer, and you must come and stay with me, and we will get hold of some of the old set—oh no, not Charlie, of course—some of the right sort.”

It was not easy to Miss Ransome, though she accomplished it—since it pleased Flora, and tied her to nothing—to give an answer to the effect that Heaven seemed to open to her at this prospect. Flora needed some amends for the plain indications she herself had been obliged to give{355} her, that the world’s market-places were not the spots where conferences with her were most to be relished; and, moreover, acquiescence in distant made it easier to evade nearer projects of reunion.

“Cannot you dine quietly with me to-night or some other night? We will get somebody to feed us at the Carlton and take us to hear Suzette at the Empire. I believe she has brought over her Paris répertoire quite unmutilated!”

Bonnybell veiled the terror inspired by this proposition by a little grimace of regret that had something of truth in it. If Lady Tennington could be made invisible and Lady Bletchley’s ears stopped, their protégée would have thoroughly enjoyed listening once again, with the perfect comprehension she did herself the justice to know that she could bring to them, to Suzette’s astonishing audacities. Suzette was canaille before everything; but what a genius!

“Oh, what a treat it would have been for me! and how dear of you to think of it! But it is—as pleasant things generally are for me, nowadays—quite out of the question. I am to spend a ‘Happy Evening.’”

“It is not quite the same class of happiness. It is a factory girls’ ‘Happy Evening.’”

“Oh, she is an old ass who does secretary and door-mat to—to—the friend I am staying with.”

After all, there were “points” in being able, for a whole hour, not to be “a nice girl.” Flora was a good sort, for she did not press her invitation, and without being asked—perhaps because she had not failed to perceive Bonnybell’s latent effort to conceal her hostess’s name—set her down at the corner of Hill Street, magnanimously refraining from any attempt to pry into what was so clearly meant to be hidden from her, though the motive for concealment could scarcely be a flattering one.

It was with a trembling hand that Bonnybell rang the bell—a project for compassing the possession of a latch-key flitting through her head—but she was quitte pour la peur. Though the church clock in South Audley Street had pointed to five minutes past two, Felicity had not missed her. She was soon—with a mind relieved at least from that portion of its load—giving a report, with excisions something like those practised on Russian newspapers, of her morning’s employment, and adorning it with touches, so nicely adapted to Felicity’s humour, that the latter ended by expressing an ecstatic wonder as to how she had ever managed to bear so long the absence from her side of such a seasoner and sweetener of her own toilsome existence. Her regret extended even to being unable—owing{357} to another engagement—to be present at the “Happy Evening,” to which Bonnybell and Miss Sloggett proceeded in the brougham without her.

Bonnybell would have liked to be silent during the drive, ruminating over the additions made to her difficulties by the morning’s meeting, and the news it brought her. But poor Sloggett’s spirits were in a very tender condition, and asked for delicate handling. A nascent jealousy of herself, which amused Miss Ransome, coupled with deep misgivings as to her own capacity for the evening’s task, combined to overset the poor secretary.

“I trust there will be no contretemps! I trust it will all go well; but I have not much confidence in myself. I am only a beginner. I hope it will be all right.”

“What does it matter if it is not? It will only be the more amusing.” It was the sort of ointment with which she was wont to anoint her own hurts, but it was clear that such was not the balm for Miss Sloggett’s wounds.

A shocked look in the face of the more conscientious understudy brought Bonnybell back at once to the sense of having deviated slightly but certainly from the path of niceness. “It must have been that whiff of Flora which demoralized me,” she said to herself, but she hastened to mend the breach.{358}

“I made the suggestion,” she said, with uncommon sweetness, “because I would not for the world add anything to Lady Bletchley’s trials” (it is just as well to pretend that I believe in that peach-fed old Felicity’s imaginary troubles), “and also because I do not want you to suffer.”

The sympathy in eye and tone was—or to Miss Sloggett it seemed so—unactably sincere.

“It is very good of you to care,” she murmured, still half-doubtfully; but there was a slight mist before her eyes.

The poor secretary’s misgivings were amply justified by the result. Not only was she, as she had tremblingly confessed, new to the task of exhibition, but the “plant” was deplorably inadequate, the magic lantern much too large for the sheet. Before it, in its first innocent blankness, sat the girls, prepared to comment, with their terrible town frankness, in giggling rows upon the magic lantern and its manager. The latter prefaced each picture with a little explanatory speech, the first tinged with regretful deprecation.

“I am afraid that, owing to the smallness of the sheet, I shall not be able to show you the whole picture at once. I will, however, show you as much as I can of ‘The Father of the Prodigal Son.’”

In fulfilment of this promise, the character alluded to flashed upon the sheet, with a very crowded and uncomfortable appearance, and—with no legs.{359}

There was a nervous sense of not entire success in the accents with which the subsequent pictures were heralded.

“You all know the story of ‘The Prodigal Son,’ don’t you, girls? how, ‘while he was yet a great way off,’ his father met him? He did not wait for the poor prodigal to come to him; he ran to meet him with outstretched arms!”

The picture followed; but the effect was somewhat marred by the fact that it revealed the father sitting motionless indoors with his head in his hands.

It was in vain that the luckless show-woman hastily explained that she had made a mistake, and that her elucidation referred to the slide that was to follow, not to the present one. To an accompaniment of squeals of laughter and flowers of cockney wit, the exhibition ignominiously ended.

It was a very crushed Miss Sloggett whose failing heart Bonnybell good-naturedly tried to uplift on the homeward drive, and a sense of amusement presently pervaded her own rather drooped spirits at the perception that, after all, the poor secretary was ready to take a leaf out of Miss Ransome’s book.

“I think,” she said, hesitatingly, “that, considering how much Lady Bletchley has of various kinds to occupy and distress her just at present, it would, perhaps, be as well not to go into details over the evening.”

Never was it the least difficult to Bonnybell to promise or perform connivance in any form of{360} deceit, and she kindly and warmly acquiesced. She had not the slightest wish to harm poor Sloggett. Was not there, after all, a good deal of analogy between their fates? (“I am a pretty Sloggett, and she is an ugly Bonnybell, but we both live by our wits.{361}”)

CHAPTER XXXII

The spring drew on disagreeably, according to its vernal wont. But if the thermometer did not tell that winter was on the wane, the lengthening days did so, and the flower-baskets in the streets told the town-dweller what sheets of anemone and narcissus were spreading over the pleasant fields of France, and scenting the sea round Scilly. As to the temperature, what did that matter in London? Warmed by every one else’s fire as well as your own, you had pity enough and to spare for shiverers in the odious country, but not much need for compassion yourself.

Such were a part of Miss Ransome’s reflections on the 10th of March. So far they were comfortable ones; but they shared the theatre of her mind with many less complacent—with many deep misgivings. Tom had not yet re-appeared on the scene, having transferred himself and his fishing-tackle to a wild part of Ireland; but his re-entrance could hardly be much longer delayed. That it was imminent Bonnybell gathered by the increased frequency of Felicity’s lamentations over the necessity for their ever parting. That it was not a necessity never seemed to occur to her, even{362} in mid-Jeremiad; even when Bonnybell, with a touch too light to brush the bloom from a butterfly’s wing, threw in an infinitely far-off hint to that effect. The satisfaction which she therefore derived from being continually told that she was Lady Bletchley’s right hand was a very mutilated one. No sign of flinching on the part of that heroic lady from the intention of cutting off that right hand was perceptible to eyes that daily and hourly grew more strainingly anxious to discover it. To make herself indispensable, that was her one chance. It had always been the leading principle of her actions since her enforced return; but she was also by nature eminently obliging and serviable. Nor did she slack her efforts, even when each day added something to her conviction that they were going to be useless. “I shall be dismissed on the day before Tom’s return,” she said to herself, with lugubrious shrewdness. “Felicity will not turn me out earlier, for her own sake, and also because she is rather compunctious about me. That is why she is thrusting me down Mrs. Slammer’s throat.”

No sign of help showed on the horizon from the direction of Stillington. The intercourse between the two families seemed slighter than ever, and it had never been close. And even if they—if Camilla—had been willing to re-house her, she was almost sure that she did not wish to go back. After what she had learnt, it would be stupid to put herself in the way of growing fonder of Edward than she already was. The degree and pertinacity of her regard for him often{363} annoyed her. No, she had no wish to go back to Stillington, and yet—what a noise those tiresome birds must be making in the wood by now!

To be Lady Bletchley’s right hand was no sinecure; but though the humanitarian interest could scarcely be said to be strongly developed in Miss Ransome, she took up her share of the burden of Felicity’s good works—increased tenfold by the latter’s rise in life—with a will, reflecting philosophically that it was quite as well not to have much time to think, since she had nothing satisfactory to think about, and finding or making many little oases of worldly pleasure amid the sands of philanthropy. Lady Bletchley had announced that she was not going out; but abstention from society, as understood by her, was compatible with seeing a large number and variety of people.

Bonnybell had received ample confirmation of the verdict pronounced by the Bond Street hansoms on the first day of her arrival. She had met many young men, gilded and ungilt, in Felicity’s drawing-room, a large number of whom had been obviously willing to endear themselves to her. It was a more respectful form of love than she had been used to in the old days; but her wary eye had detected a want of seriousness in the intentions of the majority, and even among the business-like minority not one was found, after careful sifting of their positions and prospects, worth running the risk of provoking another of Charlie’s anonymous revelations. “I must not let myself go cheap because I am in low water just now,” she said, to herself, with no sense{364} of special cynicism in the reflection. “I can well afford to wait. I shall probably even improve, and”—with a sigh—“I think I dislike the idea of marriage, if possible, more than ever!”

Charlie! Yes, Charlie was in London. She had caught sight of him one day in a little street off the Strand—Charlie was not fond of frequented thoroughfares—whither Felicity had sent her to look up a case of sweating, and, to the surprise of the chaperoning maid, had darted into a tobacconist’s shop to hide herself from him. She hoped that he had not seen her; but with Charlie one never knew. Oh, if she could make some one—some one really eligible—love her enough to dare to tell him about M——’s and the other places, she might defy Charlie—snap her fingers at him! But the test mentally applied to every one of her aspirants broke down hopelessly.

It was the 10th of March on which the blow fell. The room was the same room in which poor Miss Ransome had been made aware of Edward’s disqualifications. It seemed to gloomy after-reflections as if its one purpose in life was to be the setting for disagreeable communications. Though business was its predominant note, luxury was not altogether banished from Felicity’s sitting-room, and it was in a very well stuffed armchair, if that could be any source of comfort to her, that the “right hand” received its amputation. It was not often that Felicity allowed herself time to sit down, but she also was in an armchair, taking a brief respite from labour{365} between the trying of Court gowns and laying the foundation-stone of a Home for Infant Inebriates.

Felicity was overdoing herself with the thoroughness of a fine lady “doubled” by a social reformer. But at the present moment something besides fatigue sat on her troubled countenance. And Bonnybell recognized, through having seen it before on another face, the signal for ejection. It was too late to avert it, yet none the less was there a cheerful daughterly sympathy in her pretty voice as she said—

“What a pity that you cannot put off the Infant Inebriates to another day! I know how specially interested you are in them, poor little things, even more than you are”—with an accent of affectionate reverence—“in all good works; but you do look so tired!”

“I am tired,” replied the other. “I am always tired now. As soon as the bazaar is well over—by-the-by, the Duchess has never yet answered as to the date—I shall take a rest cure. Dr. —— says it is indispensable; that I am living on my nerves.”

The first blast of the Trump of Doom had sounded. The second was not slow to follow.

“I shall be more tired still when I have to do without you.” The voice was tender and complaining, but there was also a sort of confusion—a mauvaise honte in it. Ejectment was on the edge of the lamenting lips.

Miss Ransome’s was, after all, a brave spirit. There was an interval of scarcely five seconds before she was answering playfully, in quite a gallant voice—

“And he naturally wishes his house to be cleared of rubbish before his return.”

The confusion on Felicity’s face deepened. As an actress she had neither facility nor distinction.

“You have always an amusing way of putting things, but of course you do not mean it! You know as well as I do that Tom is the last person in the world to think anybody ‘rubbish;’ and he is the soul of hospitality, but—he has been away a long time, and perhaps—at first—he would expect to have me to himself!”

Bonnybell made a little gesture of assent. She would be able to speak in a moment or two. One thought of pious thankfulness meanwhile darted across her dismay. Thank Heaven! she had not paid any of her bills, and Camilla’s tips lay intact in her despatch-box.

“What day would you like me to go?” she asked presently, with a mild but purposed baldness, in pursuance of her intention of not, as she would have phrased it, letting Felicity down easily. “Perhaps, by working very hard, I might get the bazaar lists finished by to-morrow.”

Under the apparent generosity of the sentence there lurked a little snake of pardonable malice. Miss Ransome was well aware that the function{367} alluded to, “The Fancy Fair for All England Cataleptics,” to be held under Distinguished Patronage in the Albert Hall in mid-May, one of the Vice-Presidencies of which had been accepted by Lady Bletchley before her new honours, with all their attendant labours, had fallen upon her, was rapidly developing into an incubus and a nightmare. Bonnybell was also aware that the loss of her own aid would be an irreparable one; but there was perhaps more subtlety than kindliness in reminding her patroness of the fact at the moment. The success was all she could have wished.

“What day I wish you to go? You can have very little idea what you have been to me to put such a question.”

Miss Ransome received the reproach, made with every evidence of a wounded feeling tending towards hysterics, in unwonted silence. She did not feel inclined to caress Felicity, and for once she might follow a natural bent, since clearly nothing was to be gained by endearments. She was thinking that though Felicity had repudiated the idea of any likeness existing between herself and her brother, there was—though he was far the more delicate artist of the two—a certain resemblance between their attitude as “Chuckers Out.” There was a hurt disappointment at not receiving an answering burst of affection in return for her output of fond reproach in Lady Bletchley’s tone when she resumed—

“As to the lists, there is no hurry; for though you will not be actually in the house, you will be{368} able to help me almost as much as if you were. You will not be far off.”

“I do not quite know where I shall be.” A moment later, in uncomplaining after-thought—“If you could spare me for an hour this afternoon, I might inquire about lodgings; they would be better for me than an hotel, don’t you think—and—cheaper?”

“Lodgings! a hotel!” she repeated. “I do not know what you are talking about. Is it possible that you suppose I am going to plant you on the pavement, because I am most reluctantly compelled to abridge your visit? Would that be like me?”

The extreme out-of-countenanceness—if such a clumsy word may be framed—of her patroness, and a consciousness of how well-founded in sound reason was her own removal from Lord Bletchley’s hearth-stone before his return to it, produced a half-magnanimous, half-malicious pity in Bonnybell, and gave her back her priceless gift of feigning.

“Because you have been incomparably good to me for many weeks gives me no claim upon you for further kindness.” Such un-upbraiding acquiescence in unmerited chastisement spoke in tone and words that Felicity’s rejoinder came chokingly.

“There is no question of kindness; between people who love each other there can be no question of kindness; but come”—pulling herself together—“we must not let ourselves be{369} silly, and make mountains out of molehills; we shall still be able to see a great deal of each other. It is not more than five minutes’ walk from the Slammers’ house here.”

“Yes; how stupid of me!”—hurrying on. “I forgot that I had not explained to you that I have arranged with Mrs. Slammer for you to pay her a good long visit.”

“Yes”—still more rapidly. “You know that she is a sort of connection of yours; and she has none of that unamiable feeling about—about the past which you told me your relations in general had shown, and she is rather lonely, poor woman. Entre nous, I do not think the marriage is a great success; she has taken an immense fancy to you, and she needs a—a”—“secretary” was on the edge of Lady Bletchley’s tongue, but a memory of Bonnybell’s hopelessly fancy spelling arrested it—“a nice girl to be a sort of daughter to her. I—I could not think of anything better for the moment. I do not see why it may not work pretty well; Colonel Slammer is a great deal away from home.”

Even the naïveté of the last implication failed to stir the least sense of merriment in Miss Ransome. With lips parted by horror and dismay, she sat staring stupidly at the author of the atrocious project thus revealed, while the near future unrolled itself before her mental vision in all its squalid terror; a future of abetting a second-rate fool in her chimerical efforts for the{370} elevation of minds to whose raising or lowering Miss Ransome was and would remain absolutely indifferent; a future of conducting unwilling maid-servants by bus and tram and subterranean grimynesses to museums and libraries, which it was impossible that they could dislike more than she. The prospect was monstrous, unfaceable, and for a moment or two the idea of evading it by taking refuge with Flora, abandoning the struggle to be or seem “nice,” and returning to the old life, presented itself as the most endurable alternative. The old life and Charlie? No, Charlie was more to be shunned than any museum! That would not do....

It fell out, with an irony whose pungency Miss Ransome felt to the full, that the close of the day on which a second shipwreck had overtaken her light bark was dedicated to the last “Happy Evening” of the season. Through previous functions of the kind her gay insouciance and adaptability had carried her triumphantly. She had been a great success among the girls; had borne their affectionate horseplay with light, good humour, and had received with gratitude, tempered with regret that they should be so audible to her coadjutor, the expressions of their candidly uttered preference of her to Miss Sloggett. To-day she had no coadjutor, the secretary being confined to bed by one of those large outspoken colds which always made Lady Bletchley angry.

As Bonnybell drove along eastwards her heart felt depressed almost beyond the power of rebound. This was to be her life; this process of{371} being bandied about from one set of unwilling benefactors to another, at every change sinking deeper into distasteful drudgery. This was all the good she was to gain from being extraordinarily pretty, and always ready to agree with everybody. If the figure of Charlie had not stood like a beacon warning her off, she would have gone back to the old life, to the petits diners at improper restaurants; to the loose talk and equivocal love-making.

Whether it were due to the want of spring in her own spirits, or simply to the agency of an unkind fate, the fact remained that the girls were more unruly than usual, and more difficult to amuse. It being Friday, dancing was not among the pastimes allowed, yet Miss Ransome must have been at her wits’ end before proposing the game of Consequences to which—as a last resource, when the clamour was getting beyond her control—she resorted.

Pencils and papers were produced, and the game began. Bonnybell herself was to read out the papers at the end.

The results were disastrously successful, as far as the entertainment of the players was concerned, but also in some cases unspeakable. The luckless initiator of the game was reduced to having to pretend an inability to read the handwritings submitted to her, floundering in efforts to suppress and substitute. What they were doing was invariably “kissing.” “He gave her a kiss,{372} and she gave him a black eye.” “They met, as often as not, in a ditch.” “He said to her, ‘Give me a kiss,’ and she said to him, ‘Gow ’ome.’” The “consequences” were—— No one could call Bonnybell squeamish, yet the consequences bathed her in blushes.

A grimly amused sense of a likeness to poor Sloggett in the ill-success of her evening’s labours streaked the ink of Miss Ransome’s reflections on her homeward way.

The butler, who opened the door to her, gave her the information that her ladyship had returned, and would like to speak to Miss Ransome in her bedroom.

Felicity was in bed, but sitting up, with writing materials before her, though looking still more fagged than earlier in the day, and a good deal flushed. She dismissed Bonnybell’s expressions of surprised concern very slightly.

“Yes, the hall was hot. I felt rather faint, and had to come out before the end, but the meeting went off admirably. The delegates were delighted with their reception. What I wanted to say to you to-night, in case I might forget it to-morrow morning—not that that is likely—is that you must impress upon Mrs. Slammer that she cannot expect your help at her stall at the Cataleptics. You must explain to her that you have been engaged to me since last autumn—ever since last November.{373}”

CHAPTER XXXIII

After all, if she had but known, it would not make much difference to Lady Bletchley what or what manner of assistants Mrs. Slammer would have at her stall at the Fancy Fair for All England Cataleptics, which was to be held under Distinguished Patronage in the Albert Hall at mid-May, since at that date she herself had already been two months dead. The sequence of events which led to that catastrophe was a now not uncommon one. A vital energy weakened by over-exertion, a chill, a consultation, a successful operation—in medical parlance, a successful operation is often one in which the patient dies next day, instead of immediately under the surgeon’s knife—followed two days later by a paragraph in all the morning papers: “We regret to announce the death, which took place at an early hour yesterday morning, from appendicitis, at her residence in Hill Street, of Lady Bletchley. The deceased lady, better known as Mrs. Glanville—her husband, Lord Bletchley, having succeeded to the title by the death of the fourth Lord only in January last—was a wellknown figure in social and philanthropic circles,{374} where her loss will be long and deeply deplored. She was——” Then followed a lengthy list of societies, associations, organizations, of hospitals, institutions, and institutes, in connection with which Lady Bletchley had cut a more or less prominent figure.

Bonnybell read the flaming obituary notices carefully to the end, and then laid down the papers—her eyes felt tired—with a sigh. “Poor dear thing, how she would have enjoyed them!”

Miss Ransome still felt rather stunned from the effects of the tragic haste with which the dreadful events of the last two or three days had followed on each other’s heels—from the moment when she had left Felicity sitting up, flushed, in bed, adjuring her not to play her false in the matter of the bazaar. There had, indeed, been haste, strange haste, on the dead woman’s part to leave a world so full of a double relish and savour since her accession to fortune; such haste that she had not even waited to say a farewell word to the husband whose anxiety to “have her” to himself had been the motive for Bonnybell’s ejection.

Tom had not returned in time to see his wife alive. Though she had now been twenty-four hours dead, he had not yet returned. Camilla and Edward were in the house. They had come at once. How widely all the many ways in which Bonnybell had figured to herself the manner of her next meeting with Edward had differed from the real one! Camilla? No, there was no change in Camilla. If anything, she looked perhaps a shade less haggard than when Miss{375} Ransome had parted from her. Camilla’s face was one that matched a house of mourning. It needed no dressing to harmonize with gloom. On looking back, Miss Ransome seemed dimly to remember that she herself had been voluntarily embraced with an only half-smothered kindness, but at the time of the Tancreds’ arrival, when poor Felicity’s fate still hung in the balance, her own mind was in such a state of strained tension and grisly surprise that impressions came but blurred to it.

Now that the power of observation was coming back to her, the extreme wretchedness of Edward’s air struck her with a sense of excess. Of course, the whole affair was terrible in its suddenness; but Edward had never seemed to be very fond of his sister. Miss Ransome’s knowledge of human nature was not yet deep enough to teach her that the death of a person to whom one has owed and not given love sometimes brings with it a bitterer pang than that of one to whom has been given our poor best of tenderness.

Now that the thing was impossible, Edward was telling himself what an innocent pretence it would have been to have feigned a little interest in his sister’s unpractical schemes, a little admiration for her sincere, if wasted, humanity. The lesson that life dins into our ears with such ceaseless iteration that it seems impossible that any of us could ever fail to hear it is, To make haste to be kind! Edward felt that he had not made haste, and that now the opportunity had for ever escaped him.{376}

For a whole day and night Felicity had been dead, and Tom had not yet returned. The telegrams sent after had missed him, owing to a change in his quarters from one remote fishing village to another. More and more urgent ones had been sent in every direction, and to every one who might possibly be in communication with him, but so far he had not appeared. There could be no doubt that he would arrive to-day. After all Felicity’s precautions against their meeting, it would be Bonnybell that would receive him, and not she. Nothing ever affected Miss Ransome very deeply, but at this reflection a profounder sense than ever before of the grim quality of Fate’s sense of humour penetrated her.

She was sitting idle, in the room which had been the scene of so many of her mornings’ labours for Felicity. Evidence of the dead woman’s interrupted toils lay strewn all over the large brass-bound writing-table, bulging out of pigeon-holes in the bureau, occupying in their varied multiplicity even a part of the carpet. Poor Felicity! how astonishing it was of her to die! A quite sincere compassion, and even a small contraction of the heart, slid off into painful speculation as to how yesterday’s catastrophe would affect the speculator’s future? Would the Slammer plan still hold good? Perhaps, now that there was no longer a socially influential Lady Bletchley to oblige, it would be allowed by its entertainer to damp off. And if it did not—if it became action, how much more dismal a future it involved than it had done, even in its original{377} dreary conception! Had poor Felicity lived, she would always have been a resource, a refuge, an antidote! She would have been always joyfully grateful for as much of her society as Miss Ransome could spare; as much, that is, as would have been consistent with keeping her well separated from Tom. Tom!

Bonnybell’s thoughts came to a full stop upon the name. Irony, irony! Who was there to prevent her meeting Tom now? Poor Felicity! She was going to meet him that very minute, meet him tête-á-tête! His footfall was inaudible upon the thickly carpeted stairs; but the turning of the door-handle gave her an instant of preparation. It was as well that she had expected, since otherwise she would scarcely have recognized him! Where was the rubicund, pink-clean, amorously smiling Tom of her recollection? Could this livid, staring-haired, unshorn stranger, whose eyes were wild with misery, and mouth twitched with pain, be indeed he?

The first moment that their looks crossed, Bonnybell saw that the sight of her gave him a shock of surprise. Poor Felicity! It flashed through the girl’s mind in a moment that Tom’s wife had hidden from him all along the fact of her being a guest in his house. The look of surprise vanished, as it had come, instantaneously. It was clear that in his whole being there was no room for any feeling but one. (Perhaps, after all, Felicity had spoken the truth! Perhaps, after all, he would have liked to have her to himself!)

At that answer it seemed as if there could be nothing more of any consequence to him on earth. He asked no further questions, but sat down heavily on a chair—a business-like, green-leather-seated one—which had so often held the form of Felicity as she dictated her circulars, notices, and leaflets.

Bonnybell stood beside him, a slender, silent image of sympathy. How very much sorrier he was than she had expected! What sort of things ought she to say to him? A vague idea of having heard that people sinking into a stunned state from grief ought to be roused crossed her mind. How was he to be roused?

At that he broke into loud weeping. “If I could have heard her speak just once again—just to tell me that she forgave me!”

He was so evidently going over in acute remorse his past peccadilloes, that Bonnybell fell silent again, divided between a repelled pity—his noisy grief reminded her of Toby, never a pleasing memory—and an uncomfortable wonder{379} whether, in his present frame of mind, she herself might not be a somewhat unwelcome object to him? How curiously tender some men’s consciences were! After all, what had poor old Tom to reproach himself with?—some sly and invariably baffled attempts at caresses, and a few silly letters!

“She said over and over again to me how kind and indulgent you always were to her!”

“Kind, indulgent!” he repeated, from between his hard sobs. “Was that the way she put it? Good God! But it was just like her! There never was such an angel of goodness and gentleness and forbearance! Married five and twenty years—we should have kept our silver wedding this year—and I never had a cross word from her all that time!”

It was not in the least true. Many were the pungent snubs that, on her first visit, Miss Ransome had heard administered by Felicity to her mate, and many the nettled retorts with which he had answered. But she saw that he believed in the perfect truth of his statement, and that it gave him a sort of relief from his misery to raise his lost wife to the clouds and depress himself to the pit.

“Just look round,” he went on, turning his streaming and reddened eyes about the room upon the evidences of Felicity’s labours. “This was her life—always working for others; never giving a thought to herself; working herself to death for other people; but all on the quiet!{380} You never would have known it from her! Never a word of boasting; just doing it for the love of the thing, not wanting any credit or glory for herself!”

He paused, not because his Cornucopia of praises was empty, but because tears strangled him. Bonnybell listened in covert wonder. Was it possible that he believed all that? Could not he have found something a little nearer the truth to say of her?

“And there was I all the time, in my beastly selfishness, thinking of nothing but my own amusements; shirking everything disagreeable; laying everything on her shoulders; never profiting in the least by her example; disregarding her advice; wasting my time in doing things that I knew she disapproved of!”

The picture was to the full as overcharged as the companion portrait had been, but it was not yet highly coloured enough to suit the painter’s fancy; and since it gave a little relief to the poor man’s remorse, Bonnybell took care not to interrupt him.

“I often hurt her feelings by the things I did, even making much of other people under her very eyes! She never took the least notice, or gave me one word of reproach; but I am sure it hurt her, though she must have known how little I cared about them, about anybody, or anything, in comparison of her!”

In the bewildered agony of his mind, poor Tom had evidently clean forgotten how prominent a place in the group alluded to the lady before{381} him had taken; but she herself was somewhat acutely conscious of it, and since she had always been able to laugh at her own expense, a dreadful sense of amusement tinged the distress and awkwardness of the situation.

“She was a wonderfully handsome woman to her last day, wasn’t she? I never went into a room with her that she was not the best-looking woman there; but you have no conception what she was when I married her; her beauty was quite—quite—unearthly.”

Truth had once again returned to the bottom of her well. Felicity’s somewhat buxom charms had never struck Bonnybell as of so overpowering a character either in the present or the past. But if ever there was a pardonable fiction it lay in her acquiescence in his flights of remorseful fancy.

For another half-hour he went on piling up encomiums, some partially merited, some grossly undeserved, upon his departed wife, and heightening the whiteness of her portrait by additional strokes of lampblack added to his own, until at last he stopped, exhausted, there being no more glory left in memory or imagination to pile upon her, nor any further disgrace with which to daub himself. But the exercise had done him good.{382}

CHAPTER XXXIV

Felicity’s obsequies had been celebrated with due pomp, and—fate still continuing in her ironic vein—Lady Bletchley’s first visit to the most imposing of her new country houses—there were half a dozen of them—was made under circumstances which precluded all enjoyment of its beauties.

As Miss Ransome noted the throng of delegates and journalists who crowded round Felicity’s grave, and glanced at the inscriptions on gigantic wreaths sent by societies and institutions, she repeated to herself with less of cynicism than sincere compassion, “Poor thing, how she would have enjoyed it!”

And now the mourners were back again in Hill Street, and feeling the dull relief that ensues after an ended ordeal.

Edward, who had been with the widower, had just received and obeyed a summons to Camilla. He found her lying on the sofa in her dressing-room. She was doing it thoroughly, as she did everything; that is to say, she lay perfectly flat, with her head resting on a cushion; but her{383} attitude managed to express a protest which proclaimed that its adoption was due solely to doctor’s orders, and as little as possible to any inclination towards self-indulgence.

“Yes, now and then. He has just been telling me of a new man whom his keeper has heard of to get pheasants’ eggs from.”

Mrs. Tancred looked at her husband with penetrating surprise. She had never known Edward intolerant before; yet there was not much warmth of compassion in his tone. To one of Edward’s nature, noise and grief were impossible companions, and his brother-in-law’s uncontrolled demonstration at the graveside had, as Camilla was aware, been almost intolerable to her husband.

“Sorrow affects people in different ways,” she said, with a rebuke which was gently meant, though it sounded, as her mildest utterances always did, severe and didactic.

At that he gave—not a stage start, but one of those almost invisible movements for which stage starts are meant to stand.{384}

There was no form of ejaculation or assent in the whole range of language strong enough to express Mr. Tancred’s acquiescence in this impossibility, so he said only—

“I have not yet talked to her about her plans; if she has made any—and I doubt her having gone even so far—they are probably perfectly irrational and chimerical.”

“I do not even know—the intercourse between us has been so slack of late—whether—under your sister’s auspices—she has made any friends that could be useful or helpful to her.”

Any one but Camilla would at such a moment have prefixed a “poor” to Felicity’s name; but Mrs. Tancred would have scorned to employ the adjective to any him or her simply because they were dead. To her it seemed a very doubtful ground for compassion.

“Under the circumstances, I think there is no doubt that it is our duty to have her back, at all events, for a while.”

This time the hearer gave at first no sign of either acquiescence or dissent; then he spoke—not easily.

“How about me?” she repeated. “You know that for the present my malady seems to be at a standstill; whether owing or not to the treatment I have been undergoing I cannot tell; personally{385} I believe it to be only what I suppose would be called a reprieve, and that the operation, which lately seemed imminent, is only deferred for a more or less brief period. Anyhow, the fact remains, that I have no longer an excuse for avoiding duties disagreeable or otherwise; and I believe the case we are discussing comes under one or other of those heads.”

There could be no doubt in the husband’s mind under which head the return of Miss Ransome was mentally classed by his wife, though she magnanimously refrained from specifying it.

“It is like you to propose it,” he answered slowly; but more laggingly still, “I cannot see why you should embitter your life for the sake of a person who, after all, has no real claim upon you.”

Camilla looked at him with a calm compassion, accurately gauging what an utterance in such absolute discord with his own clearly divined inclinations had cost him.

“My life is not so easily embittered,” she rejoined quietly, “and I have never wished or expected personal enjoyment to have a very prominent part in my programme—you need not feel any disquiet on that head—and besides”—her usual rigid truthfulness combining with a wish to meet her companion’s self-sacrificing utterance in a like spirit to produce the concluding, “and besides, there is much about the girl as an inmate that is not disagreeable to me.”

If he had followed his impulses, he would have broken out into emphatic expressions of{386} gratitude; but realizing just in time what a frightful lapse from taste and seemliness it would involve to accept as a personal kindness done to himself the contemplated step, he refrained.

He left the house too, the confinement of walls and roof seeming unbearable. He must have open air and solitude in which to bring himself face to face with the new prospect, at which in his wife’s presence he had trusted himself to give only a glance. What right had he to think it so fair? He must call mightily upon Reason and Honour to cudgel him, if necessary, out of so mad and ruinous a belief. But they might cudgel him as they would—and they did belabour him soundly during the next hour—nothing could hinder him from looking at the Great Scheme of Things from a different standpoint to that with which he had regarded it as he remorsefully followed his too-little-loved sister’s hearse! Since those moments of woolly despair what had happened to better his lot or brighten his prospects? What had happened, but that a young girl of vicious origin and upbringing, standing upon a hopelessly low plane of thought and action, a young girl who had brought discomfort and scandal into his home, alienated his friends, and poisoned his wife’s peace, was to be given the opportunity of pursuing and completing her work of disintegration! What but this had happened to make “the March sun shine like May,” to turn the dry easterly blast into a zephyr? Reason and Honour combined{387} to answer emphatically, “Nothing, less than nothing!” but another voice out-shouted them, dumbing them with its insistent joyous asseveration, “Everything!” This voice was so impossible to silence, that at last he was reduced to listening to it, to asking it what it had to say for itself; and it began lengthily to explain. There were, certainly, disadvantages inseparable from the girl’s resumption of her place at his fireside—he tried to school himself into treating her in his innermost thoughts merely as “the girl”—but there would be good to be extracted from it too, if it was taken in the right way. Never could she hope to be under such wholesome and elevating an influence as his wife’s; and he himself might do something too, if he took the relation in the right way. Everything depended on taking it in the right way! He would begin at once—the very next time that they met—to set it upon a safe basis; to give the keynote of their future intercourse, and, with her extraordinary quickness and brightness, she would at once catch the right tone and keep it. God knows he had tried to do his best for her; to give her some notion of honour and truth, and decent living; and he had made some progress. She lied still, but she said fewer indecent things; and she tried with such sweet docility to see his point of view, when she managed to grasp what it was.

Thank God, he had nothing to reproach himself with, nothing, that is, that was visible or audible to any human eye or ear; but sometimes the ground had seemed to be crumbling{388} into sand under his feet. Henceforth the foundation on which he and she were together to stand was to be of granite; and if, by-and-by, he were to succeed—he and his wife together—in leading her on and up, till her mind and moral nature more nearly matched her exquisite body, what an entrancing little friend she would make for them both! how she would soothe and brighten their waning years!

To be quite on the safe side, he framed to himself the fiction that Camilla and he were coeval. That there should be any delay in embarking on this halcyon plan seemed unendurable, and he began at once to reflect upon the earliest train by which he and his augmented party might return to Stillington on the morrow.

It was in the highest degree unseemly to suspect Tom, at such an infant stage of his loud sorrow and early widowhood; but Edward knew his brother-in-law well enough to be quite sure that the lapse of a very few days would see him—if Bonnybell wore an apron—drying his eyes upon a corner of it. So Mr. Tancred wondered whether his wife would think the 8.50 train too early.

Meanwhile, the cause of Mr. Tancred’s self-schoolings was in no danger of incurring a remorse like his for being too cheerful. She was alone in a sitting-room, which had been occupied by her during the last two or three days, because, since it looked to the back, its blinds had not needed to be pulled down, and she was sitting in an attitude of, for once, entirely unstudied dejection.{389} Since no one was likely to intrude upon her, she might be and look just as miserable or as little miserable as she felt inclined. The quantum of grief expressed by her whole person was enough to have satisfied even the claims of Tom’s gluttonous demands upon his friends for a sorrow as vociferous as his own.

For once Miss Ransome’s philosophy was quite out of gear, and her spirits had descended below the soles of her feet, and abode there. She had cried a good deal, though not in public—a thing which she always disliked. Private weeping could serve no purpose of cajoling, persuading, or mollifying, and was likely to be damaging to that stock in trade of which her eyes formed so valuable an item; and she had hated the funeral. It had reminded her of poor Claire’s, though, except in the main fact, no other functions could ever have differed more widely; and for “Claire” in her small, cool heart, there always lingered a remnant of rueful pity, though it never ran to the length of wishing to have her back again.

Tom’s deportment and appearance at the ceremony had been as repulsive to her as to his brother-in-law. Why, in Heaven’s name, if he were so overwhelmed with grief at the loss of a wife, his tenderness to whom while in life had been eked out by so many fond by-plays with others, could not he control it as an English gentleman of his class and breeding was bound to do? Why, in the face of that large and reverent gathering, need he have roared like a bull and blubbered like a whipped schoolboy?{390} And why, oh, why need Edward and he have stood side by side, so as to bring into monstrous prominence the contrast between them? Not even grief had succeeded in paling Tom, and the image of his rubicund face defaced by tears, of his bulky outline and shining bared head beside the silent pale dignity of Edward’s sorrow, filled Bonnybell with physical disgust.

Her thoughts moved on a little from the funeral to a scene that followed the return from it. “Poor old woman, she really did not do it badly, considering how little practice she has had in pretending. I could have given her a few hints, but it really was a very creditable performance; and in a way I think it was a disappointment to her to forego continuing my education. Never again can she hope to have a pupil who set off by, and meant to go on, knowing as little as I!”

Upon the hitherto unlightened gloom of her spirits there played a little ray of cynic mirth, but the gust of a heavy sigh blew it out. “But what a relief too! I saw a sort of shining come into her poor old eyes—they are not nearly so hard and horny as they were when first I knew them—and when she at last took in that I was in earnest, that the Slammers’ invitation was not one of my tasteful embroideries, how hard she tried not to beam too flagrantly!”

A pause, and then a still heavier sigh than the last. “I was right, undoubtedly I was right. It would have been madness. It may be all very well for people who have a high level, and think{391} they can keep up to it—it would still remain to be proved if they could—but as for me, I never had any level to speak of, and I do not possess that confidence in myself which I once had. I believe I am quite capable of committing a sottise if I put myself in the way of it; and at this time of the year I suppose all those horrid birds in the copse would be love-making, and it might have been catching.”

As she spoke, the door gently opened; and, since the sitting-room was a general one there was nothing strange in the fact, the object of her thoughts came in.

“My wife will have told you that we hope, unless you have any objection to the plan, to take you back to Stillington with us to-morrow, and I have come to ask you if the 8.50 from Paddington would be too early for you.”

He had got the right key, hospitable and courteous, erring perhaps a little on the side of excess in the way of formality, but that was a fault on the safe side.

Before he spoke, Bonnybell had known that he had not yet heard, and that it would be her task to tell him. She saw also, with a slight tinge of bitter amusement, his anxiety not to let their point of departure for the long ordeal ahead of them be one of too great intimacy. (“Reassure yourself, my poor Edward; you may set your mind at rest.”)

The lack of her usual civil promptness in{392} acknowledging a courtesy caused him a slight surprise, but it was so far not coupled with any misgiving. It did not need any of that self-esteem in which Edward was so singularly lacking to feel sure that his hearer could have no alternative plan which she would think preferable to the one now offered her, so he added, still with that soupçon of formality—

Consciousness of his endeavour to keep her at arm’s length gave her the strength to show him the needlessness of his precautions, though her mode of opening the subject was misleading.

“You always thought me rather a sluggard,” she said softly; “do you remember?”

But no “do you remembers” were to enter into his programme, and though more against the grain than he liked to own, he cut this one short.

“I never could understand why there is a virtue per se in getting up early.”

“No,” she answered, acquiescing sweetly in the lopping off the head of her bud of reminiscence; “there are enough real virtues and vices, aren’t there, without loading us with mock ones?”

“It is settled, then?”—taking for granted with unconscious arbitrariness what she had not said—“8.50.”

To his intense surprise and alarm her answer was to rise from the depths of her chair—what a{393} little slip of a thing she looked in her new mourning! Launce’s description of his sister, “White as a lily and small as a wand,” darted across Edward’s mind—and drawing near him, she laid her hand upon his coat-sleeve. Evidently the keeping at arm’s length would be a harder task than he had promised himself.

“No, it is not settled,” she said; “nothing about it is settled except that you have made one poor creature even more everlastingly your debtor than she was before by proposing it.”

He looked back at her aghast, yet only half believing, unconscious of what at any other moment he would have been tinglingly aware, the clasp of her fingers on his arm. He knew her to be so complete a liar, that the mere fact of her announcing that she did not purpose to return to Stillington was, as likely as not, to mean that she had every intention of doing so. Was this refusal one of her infinite wiles to lure him into cajoling and caressing her into compliance?

“Am I to understand that you have made other plans?” His voice was frosty; too frosty, perhaps, or it seemed so to himself, for he added more in his own manner, “I beg your pardon for what may sound like an impertinent intrusion, but you have taken me by surprise.”

The chill in his tone had loosened her clasp upon his sleeve, and they stood near but apart from one another.

There was such hopeless bewilderment in his repetition of the name that she felt the need of enlightening him.

“I am stupid to-day; probably you have never heard of them. I was forgetting how little you know of the life here of late.”

“You need not remind me that I was a neglectful brother,” he answered, in a key of such profound regret that she took refuge from her dangerous pity of him in explanation.

“They are, in a way, connections of mine—at least, he is; his name was Ransome before he married her. He was, like the rest of the family, not a very shining light, I believe, but now he has ranged himself, I suppose, and she is very philanthropic and platformy and religious.”

He received the blow in total silence, being not one of those who cry out when they are hurt. When at last he spoke, it was with a measured impartiality, which sounded to himself grossly overdone.

“One ought not to think of one’s own happiness,” she answered, in her “nicest” manner; then with a flash of self-ridicule for serving up so coarsely dressed a dish of “goodness” to one who knew her much too well to swallow it, she added with a laugh, whose hysteric quality, if half affected, was also half natural—“at least, so Mrs. Slammer tells her husband when she whips off her cordon bleu half an hour before dinner to see the Monument.{395}”

Her mental comment on her own speech—for she was not one with whom thought and word ever flowed parallel—ran thus: “What atrocious taste to be making bad jests to poor Felicity’s brother on the day of the funeral! but if I am not flippant, God knows what I may say or do!”

He stood before her absolutely still, not moving a muscle at her dull pleasantry.

“Have you thought it well over? Are you quite sure that it would not be better for you to come back with us to Stillington to-morrow?”

Once again the calm aloofness of his tone sounded overdone to Edward’s ear, but it did not for a moment take in his hearer. (“Poor fellow, how hard he is trying to be good! I suppose it is a beautiful sight, and I must not be outdone.”) There was the gentlest rebuke in her sorrowful little voice as she answered—

“I know that you are not likely to be joking to-day; but when you ask that you seem to be mocking me.”

She dropped her eyes to the carpet, and gave him the opportunity of verifying that the large white lids were a little swollen and discoloured with weeping. He had to count thirty clock-beats before her answer came. (“If I give in now, I am done for,” she was saying to herself. “At the present moment I feel as if Edward would make up for everything; as if nothing in the world would be of any value without him, but I know all the while that I do not really think{396} so.”) She raised her eyes slowly, as if tears made them difficult to lift.

In the tension of the moment neither of them noticed Bonnybell’s unwonted use of Mrs. Tancred’s Christian name. (She must have been mistaken in thinking that Edward looked white as he stood by his sister’s grave. If he was white then, what was he now?)

“Do not misunderstand me,” she went on, almost under her breath, but quite distinctly; “what I mean to say is that I do not see how things are changed since I was sent away because she was too ill to have the worry and anxiety of me.”

If Bonnybell’s eyes had found it hard to raise themselves, Edward’s lips found it harder still to frame the few words of his response.

“For the moment, yes; but it may be only a reprieve. She told me herself that she looked upon it only as a reprieve.”

In the eagerness and real emotion with which she was putting forth her apology, Miss Ransome forgot for the moment to postulate the supposable regret which she had always believed to be non-existent in the mind of the husband at the probability of his wife’s death; yet for a moment that oversight gave the husband an acute revulsion of feeling.

“God grant she may be wrong!” he said with a low fervency which, as his hearer felt,{397} could not have been put on. She saw her error, and hastened to repair it.

“I was going to say you cannot wish it more than I do!”—with a slight low laugh at the exaggeration of her own expression—“but I do wish it with all my heart! I should be a monster of ingratitude if I did not.”

It was very nearly true. Since Camilla’s death could in no wise profit her, and the memory of her solid kindliness was fresh and vivid, Miss Ransome did wish, with as much sincerity as she was capable of, that Camilla should live, and not die, if she thought such a life as hers worth having.

After that there was not much more to be said, and in a few moments he left her. Neither by the 8.50 nor by any other train was she to return to his hearth’s side. As he reached the door she called softly after him; since she was quite safe now she might give herself that slight indulgence—

“Give my love to the birds. I hope that your next pupil will be quicker in learning your lessons about them.”

He answered, “I shall never have another pupil;” and it was to his credit that this was the nearest he ever went to a declaration.{398}

CHAPTER XXXV

A year and a day had passed since Lady Bletchley’s obsequies. (The word is what she would herself have liked to hear applied to them.) All the presidencies, vice-presidencies, memberships of committees and governing bodies which she had so stirringly filled, had been apportioned among half a dozen less active-minded holders; and though the newspapers of the day had pronounced her loss to be an irreparable one, to the naked eye it seemed already repaired. On the other hand, her memory probably lurked unsuspected in the breasts of recipients of her least trumpeted benefactions. The winter had been mild, and the season promised to be a forward one.

And above the sheeted primroses in the Stillington woods the birds’ calls and rondels rang out in intemperate gladness. That was outside; within,{399} a white woman lay on a bed—a white woman lately escaped from the surgeon’s knife, escaped with life from the surgeon’s hands.

Camilla, in the late months of growing suffering, had made every disposition for death; had “set her house” in order—not that it ever needed that—and had turned her stern face with silent valour towards the unpierceable darkness of the grave. And Death would have none of her! Not only had the operation she had undergone been performed successfully, in a different sense from poor Felicity’s, but it had revealed the comparatively harmless character of the malady that had rendered it necessary. Camilla was to live, and not die.

He bowed his head on her hands; and she felt his tears upon them. Then he lifted his face.

“Forgive you! Forgive the one person in the world who loves me for having the charity not to leave me!”

Though Mrs. Tancred’s convalescence was a rapid one, she was not for some days allowed to see her correspondence, nor read any of the numerous letters of sympathy and congratulation addressed to her husband. Amongst the first{400} put into her hands by the latter was one which ran as follows. It was dated on the eve of the operation.

“212, Green Street,
“London, W.

“My dear Mr. Tancred,

“I have heard of the dreadful anxiety you are in about dearest Mrs. Tancred, and must send you a line to tell you how deeply, deeply I simpathize with you!” (The first i in simpathize had looked to the writer a little odd, but not enough so to cause alteration of the vowel.) “If you could let me know how she gets over it, I should be so, so grateful to you! I hope you will not think me impertinent for writing to you, but I am so miserable about you both!”

“Your deeply grieved
“Bonnybell.”

“P.S.—I should not tell you at such a moment, only that I cannot bear you to hear from any one else, that Lord Bletchley has persuaded me to marry him. I did not at all wish to at first—you know that I always rather hated the idea of marrying—but I cannot stay on here, as complickations have arisen.”

Miss Ransome had meant to have run that doubtful k to earth in the dictionary, but in the ardour of composition had forgotten this necessary precaution. “Of course, Edward will understand that Colonel Slammer has been making love to{401} me!” At this point the writer had laid down her pen, and rested her pensive head upon a left hand from which some very fine diamonds shot their reconciling sparkle. “It seems brutal to tell him just at this moment, of all others, but I know that it is the truest kindness. He is so good-hearted that he will feel the blow less while he is soothing poor dear Camilla’s last moments.” She glanced at her betrothal ring. “I know I shall be glad by-and-by; but it does seem rather dearly bought just now.” With a sigh she resumed her pen—

“We are both rather alone in the world, and I am sure he will be kind to me. We shall be much more like father and daughter than husband and wife.”

Camilla laid down the letter. “It seems rather soon,” she said; and that was the only comment which the remarriage of their connection with their protégée ever evoked between husband and wife.

At the time it was being uttered Bonnybell was sitting on a sofa in the Slammer drawing-room beside her fiancé. A barrier of sofa-cushions had—accidentally as it appeared to Tom—risen between them. Across, but unable to level them, the lover leaned and beamed.

“And you are quite sure that you never were in love with any one else before?”

“Nor”—a hesitation and an altered tone—“nor—with—Edward Tancred?”

“If you are going to ask me ridiculous and improper questions, I shall be obliged to give up talking to you.”

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